Who killed Kathleen Heisey? 22 years after beloved principal was hacked to death, family awaits justice
BAKERSFIELD, CALIFORNIA: Kathleen Heisey was the grade school principal that everyone in town loved and adored and the kind of person who did not have any enemies.
So, when she was found in a pool of blood in her home hacked and slashed to death in 1998, nobody could quite wrap their heads around the murder. Who would want to kill a harmless 50-year-old, single mother-of-one?
More than 20 years later, it's a question that continues to haunt law enforcement as their search for her elusive killer has still turned up no answers.
Heisey was the principal of Browning Road Elementary School in McFarland, around 25 miles north of Bakersfield, when she was mysteriously found dead on June 30, 1998.
Her friends and colleagues had begun suspecting that something was amiss two days earlier when she had failed to show up for a school meeting without notice, which was very unlike her.
When she didn't show up on campus again the next day, office personnel called up Lynn Runyan, her lifelong friend, and asked her to check up on the principal.
Runyan reached Heisey's residence at around noon on June 30, and when she managed to get herself inside, she came across a blood bath. Her friend had been brutally stabbed to death with a large knife.
Kevin Legg, the first homicide detective assigned to the case all those years ago, said the murder appeared to have been carried out by someone who was known to Heisey because of its graphic nature. "It wasn’t a poking-type of stab wound," he shared. "It was like an overhand into the upper torso, slash down until you hit bone and then you go right or left. There was overkill, which indicated to me it was personal."
Heisey also had two guns inserted into her body, which investigators said was a sexual statement of defiance or rage or hatred. After being killed, she had reportedly been dragged from the living room to the bedroom.
Furthermore, nothing had been stolen and there were no signs of forced entry.
There were no witnesses to the crime, no murder weapon was found, and no knives were missing, which left detectives with almost nothing to follow as they sought out the perpetrator.
One of the popular theories suggested Heisey's death was random and that she was the victim of a serial killer, Michael Charles Brown, a serial rapist and convicted murderer on death row in San Quentin.
While Brown shares no connection to Heisey, investigators have suspected him because of the similarities in her death and several crimes that have been attributed to him.
Heisey's son, Timm, on the other hand, claimed he is sure that his mother had been murdered by Lloyd Wakelee, a counselor at the school. Timm revealed that he left his mom just a day or two before the murder for training as a cadet at the US Naval Academy and that before he did so, she told him she was terrified of Wakelee.
"She told him that she was writing a bad evaluation on him and when she presented it to him he flipped out and basically said, 'If you submit that, it’ll be the last thing you ever do,'" he said. "She came home just hysterical. Several days later she was stabbed to death in her home."
Wakelee, 6-foot-1 and 225 pounds at the time of the homicide, was a prime suspect but was never arrested. His family said he had complied with all police requests, including providing a DNA sample and taking a lie detector test, and was innocent.
But court records show that Wakelee had quite a severe anger management problem. In 1983, he was charged with assaulting a postal employee and destroying property after smashing a postal service computer because he did not get a registered letter when he wanted it.
He was sentenced to four years probation and required to have treatment by a clinical psychologist for the crime, but never put that anger behind him.
On March 11, 1998, just three-and-a-half months before the Heisey killing, he allegedly threatened a commuter with a 3-foot-long, 1-inch-wide sword during a road rage incident.
A year later, in 1999, in another road rage incident, he is said to have produced a whip and beat the victim. He was charged with multiple counts of misdemeanor assault, assault with a deadly weapon, and battery.
Friends, however, feel police should have looked more aggressively into Bob Taylor, who was Heisey's illicit boyfriend. Taylor, who has three divorces to his name, had been married to his second wife at the time and had reportedly been given an ultimatum to leave her shortly before Heisey was killed.
Heisey's daughter, Lisa, found a response from Taylor where he begged her mother to not end their four-year relationship. He was with Heisey just hours before her murder as well.
But even if police wanted to question Taylor now, they couldn't. Now 71, he is disabled by dementia, a sickness that also happens to be afflicting Wakelee. Detectives are seemingly back on square one.
Heisey's brutal murder has been profiled in the latest episode of Oxygen's investigative crime show 'The DNA of Murder with Paul Holes' which will air on the network at 7 pm on April 11.