A father found his missing daughter in a pool shed and then shot her attacker dead.

On the last Saturday in June 2003, the air in Jackson County, Mississippi, was thick with heat and the smell of wet pine. Families set up folding chairs for barbecues, children chased each other through sprinklers, and at the Jackson County Community Pool, a 19-year-old college student named Elena Kemp was closing up the concession stand.

Apparently, it was a routine shift, her last before returning to Ole Miss for summer classes.

At 9:14 p.m., a security camera captured her walking toward her white Toyota Corolla, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. She smiled at a coworker. Then she disappeared.

One Family’s First Scary Night

When Ronald and Janice Kemp woke up the next morning to find their daughter’s bed empty, they told themselves she might have been sleeping over with a friend. By midmorning, when her phone went straight to voicemail, denial gave way to fear.

“She never stayed up late. Never,” Janice said in an interview. “When she didn’t answer my messages, I knew something had happened.”

At 10:46 that night, the Kemps filed a missing person’s report. Within hours, sheriff’s deputies and volunteers were combing roadsides, ditches, and riverbanks, calling Elena’s name into the damp darkness.

“We all thought we’d find her,” recalled Carla Hughes, a local reporter who covered the case for the Jackson County Gazette. “No one believed something like this could happen here.”

The Discovery

At dawn on Monday, June 30, a farmer driving along County Road 12 noticed something pale in a drainage ditch. It was a white sleeveless T-shirt. Beneath it lay Elena Kemp.

“It’s the kind of scene you never forget,” said Detective Lee Harris, now retired. “You could tell she fought. She fought with all her might.”

The forensic report described evidence of assault and strangulation. Traces of motor oil and gray paint stains clung to her clothing—details investigators would later describe as their first real clues.

A Dismantled Community

The murder shocked Jackson County, a place where porch lights doubled as neighborhood watches and strangers still waved from passing pickup trucks. Parents began escorting their daughters to part-time jobs. Churches held vigils.

Within a week, posters with Elena’s smiling face appeared on supermarket doors and in gas station windows. Beneath her photo, in black marker, someone had scrawled: Find Him.

Detectives circulated a description of a man seen near the pool parking lot that night: in his thirties, unshaven, driving a white pickup truck with a ladder rack. But the tip line was filled mostly with false leads. “Half the men in this county drive white pickup trucks,” Harris said.

A Father’s Turning Point

While investigators waited for the lab results, Ronald Kemp stopped waiting for anyone.
He called old friends from the paper mill, organized his own search parties, and spent nights parked across the street from the pool where his daughter worked, staring at the vacant lot through the windshield.

“They told me to let the police handle it,” he later said. “But how do you stay home when the man who killed your daughter is still breathing the same air?”

As summer gave way to fall and the cicadas quieted, Kemp’s grief began to turn into something more: an obsession that would soon take him far beyond the confines of his small Mississippi town.

Next: Episode 2 — “The Man in the White Truck.”

Two weeks after 19-year-old Elena Kemp’s body was discovered in a drainage ditch off County Road 12, the investigation into her murder had stalled. Leads had gone cold, witness statements were inconsistent, and the small Jackson County Sheriff’s Office was under pressure in a case that seemed to demand more than its modest resources could handle.

But for Ronald Kemp, Elena’s father, time had taken on a different meaning. Every hour that passed without an arrest felt like a betrayal.
“I knew they were doing what they could,” he later said. “But I also knew it wasn’t enough.”

The Elusive Suspect

The only substantial lead detectives had was a description repeated by several witnesses:
A man in his thirties, unshaven, driving a white pickup truck with a ladder rack and faded blue decals. He had been seen wandering around the parking lot near the community pool around the time Elena finished her shift.

Officers searched the area, compiling a list of contractors, mechanics, and delivery drivers who matched the general profile. They questioned dozens of men. None fit the bill.

“We followed a lead and always hit a wall,” recalled Detective Lee Harris, who led the case. “In small towns, you learn how quickly rumors turn into evidence if you’re not careful.”

A Break from Routine

One afternoon, as Harris checked license plates, a name caught his eye: Earl Danner, 36, an itinerant house painter with a history of assault and burglary. He had lived briefly in neighboring counties and was known for driving an old Ford F-150: white, rusty, and equipped with a ladder rack.

When officers arrived at his last registered address, the house was empty. A neighbor said Danner had left town the week before Elena disappeared. “He told me he got a job in Mobile,” the neighbor said.

It wasn’t enough to get a warrant. Still, Danner’s name entered the file, underlined twice in red ink.

A Father’s Investigation

By August, Ronald Kemp stopped waiting to hear from the Sheriff’s Office. He started visiting houses himself, first in Jackson County and then across the state line, in Alabama.

He carried a folder with printed maps, gas receipts, and photos of Elena smiling in her Ole Miss sweatshirt. “People were talking to me because I wasn’t a cop,” he said. “They saw a father.”

At a truck stop outside Mobile, a waitress told him about a man who had passed by the week after the murder: dirty jeans, paint-stained hands, driving a battered white Ford. “He said his name was Earl,” she told him.

Ronald wrote it down. Later that night, in a cheap motel, she compared the details with the only name she’d seen mentioned on a missing persons forum: Earl Danner. It was the first moment she believed she was close to her daughter’s killer. Silence and Frustration

In Jackson County, investigators remained cautious. Without physical evidence or a confirmed sighting, Danner remained a “person of interest,” not a suspect. The Sheriff’s Office issued a brief statement urging patience, emphasizing that the investigation was ongoing.

That statement did little to quell one father’s anger.

“I remember him coming into the newsroom one night,” said Carla Hughes, the local reporter. “He left a folder on my desk and said, ‘They’re letting him go.’ He wasn’t threatening, just desperate.”

A Divided People

As the months passed, public sympathy for Ronald Kemp deepened, but so did the unease. His friends feared he was slipping into obsession. His church members described him as “a tormented man.”

He quit his job at the paper mill and began spending his savings on gas, brochures, and private investigators. On his kitchen table, stacks of maps and case notes replaced the family Bible.

When later asked if he regretted it, he shook his head.
“I wasn’t looking for revenge,” he said. “I was looking for the truth.”

The Photo

In late September, a truck driver in southern Alabama called the Jackson County tip line. He claimed to have seen a man matching Danner’s description at a rest area near Pascagoula. Officers responded, but by the time they arrived, the man was gone.

Days later, Ronald drove there. Near a pay phone, half buried in gravel, he found something the police had overlooked: a discarded Polaroid photo, warped and sun-faded. In the photo, a white pickup truck

Next: Episode 3 — “Ghost on the Run.”

By October 2003, the summer heat in Jackson County had subsided, but the Kemp family’s nightmare hadn’t.
Four months had passed since 19-year-old Elena Kemp’s body was found in a drainage ditch. The official investigation remained open, but stalled. For the Sheriff’s Office, the suspect—a homeless man named Earl Danner—was a shadow. For Elena’s father, Ronald Kemp, he had become an obsession.

“Every night, I imagined him sleeping in a warm place,” Ronald said years later. “While my daughter was six feet underground.”

A Name That Disappeared on Paper

When Jackson County deputies traced the license plate of Danner’s old pickup truck to an auto repair shop in Mobile, they found nothing but fragments: receipts signed in different handwriting and a phone number that led to a disconnected line.

“Danner was the kind of man who could disappear without a trace,” said Detective Lee Harris, who retired in 2012 but still keeps the case file in a desk drawer. “No credit cards, no family, no trace of Social Security. He was a ghost even before the murder.”

However, rumors of sightings swirled: a man matching his description was seen at a bus station in Biloxi, another in Baton Rouge. Neither could be confirmed.

A Father’s Search

Unable to sit still, Ronald began tracking Danner’s possible route along the Gulf Coast.
He visited laundromats, hardware stores, and roadside diners, asking questions, showing photos of Elena, and sometimes offering money for information.

“I wasn’t trying to play detective,” he said. “But I knew the police weren’t chasing him the way I would be.”

At a motel off Highway 90, a night clerk recalled a man who checked in as “E. Darnel.” He stayed two nights, paid cash, and left early one morning, leaving behind a crumpled church bulletin from a town 80 miles west.

Ronald drove there the next day.

A Lead in Louisiana

In Lafayette Parish, Louisiana, Ronald walked into a local police station with a folder full of photocopied photographs and notes. He asked to speak to a detective about a possible fugitive.

“The officer on duty told me, very politely, that I wasn’t a police officer,” Ronald recalled. “He said if I kept crossing state lines chasing people, I could get in trouble.”

But the folder caught someone’s attention: Detective Claire Montrose, a young investigator known for her persistence. “He was desperate, but organized,” Montrose said. “Most grieving parents cling to hope. He clung to evidence.”

She agreed to run Danner’s name through the Louisiana system. Days later, a partial fingerprint match was revealed from an arrest two years earlier in Shreveport (vandalism, later dismissed).

It wasn’t a breakthrough, but it confirmed one thing: Danner had once lived in Louisiana.

Sightings Multiply

In late October, a truck driver reported seeing a man matching Danner’s description at a gas station outside Baton Rouge: the same white Ford F-150, the same blue ladder rack.
By the time the police arrived, he was gone.

A week later, she received another call from New Orleans: a house painter doing odd jobs under the name “Earl Daner.” No address. No phone number. Just a name on a receipt for paint thinner.

“We’d arrive, and it was always like chasing smoke,” Harris said. “Every time we thought we were close, he was gone.”

The Cost

Back in Mississippi, Janice Kemp watched her husband disappear in a different way. He called less frequently. When he did, his voice had a frantic tone she barely recognized.

“He’d say, ‘I’m close this time,’” she said. “But close never meant safe.”

Neighbors began to whisper that Ronald had crossed a line, that his grief had turned to revenge. At church, some prayed for his peace; others prayed that he wouldn’t do something he wouldn’t regret.

In one of his notebooks, dated November 2, Ronald wrote a single line:

“If the law doesn’t bring him home, I will.”

The Border

By winter, Ronald’s search had taken him to Texas. Motel records show him checking into a roadside inn near Beaumont in December 2003. The desk clerk remembered his manner of speaking: polite, firm, but with eyes that “looked like he wasn’t sleeping.”

He spent his days asking for a painter named Earl. He slept with a revolver in the glove compartment.

One night, after leaving a restaurant on the outskirts of Jasper, he saw a pickup truck leaving the parking lot.