Benjamin Appleby: Arrest, Hard 50 Sentence, and Appeals

Benjamin Appleby is the Missouri-born drifter and pool-cleaning contractor who murdered 19-year-old Ali Kemp at a Leawood, Kansas swimming pool in June 2002. He was arrested in Connecticut in November 2004 after a two-and-a-half-year manhunt driven largely by a billboard campaign, confessed to the killing, and was convicted of capital murder in December 2006. A Johnson County judge sentenced him to life under Kansas’s “Hard 50” law. He will not be eligible for parole until November 2054.

The Killing at the Leawood Pool

On June 18, 2002, Ali Kemp was working her summer job at a neighborhood swimming pool on State Line Road in Leawood, a Kansas City suburb. Her father, Roger Kemp, found her body hidden in the pump room. An autopsy determined she had been strangled. She had broken fingers and fingernails from fighting back.¹ Investigators found signs of a struggle and an uncapped tube of antiseptic ointment that they later concluded had been intended as lubrication for an attempted sexual assault.²

Ali was a Kansas State University student. Her boyfriend of five years, a KU student named Phil Howes, was looked at briefly and cleared with a solid alibi. Police developed a composite sketch of a man seen driving a Ford pickup truck near the pool that day. Early in the case, detectives had spoken with a man calling himself “Ted Hoover.” He was not treated as a suspect at that point.²

How Appleby Was Identified and Arrested

The case stalled. Roger Kemp responded with a publicity campaign that would eventually put the composite sketch on billboards across the Kansas City area, in USA Today, on cross-country truck flyers, and on America’s Most Wanted. One billboard company donated the space at no cost. A $25,000 Crime Stoppers reward was matched by city officials, bringing the total to $50,000.¹

Tips poured into the Crimestoppers hotline. Two of them named a local pool maintenance man, Teddy Hoover, an alias Appleby had been using.³ When Leawood police contacted him, he fled. Working with postal authorities, detectives traced his girlfriend to Connecticut and found Appleby living there under the same alias.¹ Kansas officers learned Connecticut had an outstanding 1998 warrant on him from an indecent exposure case in Woodbury and asked local authorities to delay the arrest so Kansas detectives could be there for the interrogation.⁴

Connecticut State Police arrested Appleby on November 8, 2004. Kansas detectives were present, helped search his residence, and collected DNA. At the police station, Appleby confessed to killing Ali Kemp. He said he “lost it” after she hit him when he “came onto her,” and admitted trying to rape her after she lost consciousness.³ The next day, Johnson County prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder and set bond at $1 million. District Attorney Paul Morrison said Appleby could face the death penalty. The charge was later upgraded to capital murder, and Appleby waived extradition to Kansas.⁵

Appleby’s Background and Prior Record

Appleby had a criminal history spread across several states. The Missouri State Highway Patrol had arrested him multiple times and he carried felony convictions there for second-degree robbery and second-degree sexual misconduct.³ While living in Missouri, he had assumed the identity of a dead friend.⁶

In 1997 he moved to Connecticut, where he exposed himself to a student at Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury and was charged with risk of injury to a minor, public indecency, and disorderly conduct. He fled the state before the case could be prosecuted, and the warrant sat open for years.⁷ Using the name “Teddy Hoover II,” he moved between Connecticut, Missouri, Kansas, Nevada, and Texas.⁸ By 2002 he was living in the Kansas City area, running a small pool-cleaning business. His father lived in Kansas.³

Trial, Conviction, and Hard 50 Sentence

Appleby was tried in Johnson County District Court over seven days in late 2006. The jury found him guilty of capital murder and attempted rape. On December 26, 2006, the trial judge imposed a life sentence under the Kansas Hard 50 statute, which required a minimum of 50 years in prison before parole eligibility. A consecutive 228-month sentence was added for the attempted rape.⁹¹⁰

Under the version of the Hard 50 law in force at the time, the trial judge — not the jury — decided whether the aggravating factors justifying the enhanced minimum had been proven. That procedure became the core of Appleby’s later appeals.

Why the Appeals Failed

Appleby has taken his case through every level of the Kansas and federal court systems. None of it has moved his release date.

Direct Appeal

On November 20, 2009, the Kansas Supreme Court affirmed his capital murder conviction and life sentence. It did reverse the attempted rape conviction as multiplicitous of the capital murder count, meaning he was being punished twice for the same underlying conduct.¹⁰

Federal Habeas

In February 2015, Appleby filed a federal habeas corpus petition in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas. He argued, among other things, that his confession had been taken after he requested an attorney, that the Hard 50 scheme was unconstitutional, that his trial counsel had been ineffective for not calling experts or moving to suppress, and that DNA evidence had been improperly admitted. The district court denied the petition on December 27, 2016.¹¹ The Tenth Circuit denied a certificate of appealability on September 28, 2017, finding that Appleby’s requests for a lawyer during Connecticut booking had been ambiguous or tied to the Connecticut charges rather than the Kansas murder interrogation, and that trial counsel’s choices were reasonable strategy.¹²

The Hard 50 Challenge

Appleby’s most persistent argument targeted his sentence. In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Alleyne v. United States that any fact increasing a mandatory minimum must be found by a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. The Kansas Supreme Court then applied Alleyne in State v. Soto and declared the state’s Hard 50 scheme unconstitutional because it let judges find aggravating factors.¹⁰

Kansas courts held, however, that Alleyne does not apply retroactively to sentences already final when it was decided. Appleby’s conviction became final in 2010, three years before Alleyne. A Johnson County judge denied his motion to correct an illegal sentence on October 24, 2019.¹³ The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed that ruling on April 30, 2021, holding that no procedural mechanism existed to reopen the sentence and rejecting his argument that a state statute served as a “fail-safe” entitling him to resentencing.¹⁰ Appleby petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for certiorari; the most recent filings in that effort are from late 2021.⁹ A separate Tenth Circuit appeal raising many of the same issues was dismissed on March 21, 2019.¹⁴

Where Appleby Is Now

Appleby remains in the Kansas state prison system. According to the Kansas Department of Corrections, his first parole eligibility date is November 2054, when he will be in his late seventies.¹⁴ Since the 2021 certiorari petition, no further legal proceedings in his case have been reported.

1
A&E. Ali Kemp 2002 Murder
2
Oxygen. Ali Kemp Murder Ben Appleby Pool Billboards
3
Lawrence Journal-World. Suspect Charged in Kemp Murder
4
U.S. Supreme Court. Appleby Petition for Certiorari
5
Lawrence Journal-World. Suspect Faces Capital Murder Charge
6
Newstimes. News Briefs
7
Hartford Courant. Kansas Police Catch Breaks Here
8
FindLaw. Appleby v. Cline, Tenth Circuit
9
U.S. Supreme Court. Appleby Petition for Certiorari
10
FindLaw. State v. Appleby, Kansas Supreme Court
11
GovInfo. Appleby v. Cline, U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas
12
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. Appleby v. Cline, Tenth Circuit Opinion
13
FOX4 Kansas City. Judge Denies Request by Ali Kemp’s Killer to Have His Hard 50 Sentence Thrown Out
14
Kansas City Star. Appeals Court Rejects Ali Kemp Killer’s Appeal