-
11. Carrie: Second Coed's Slaying Leads to Death Row
- University Press of Kansas
- Chapter
- Additional Information
123 CHAPTER ELEVEN Carrie: Second Coed’s Slaying Leads to Death Row Less than one year after the Kansas Supreme Court affirmed that Donald Ray Gideon should remain in prison until his 119th birthday for raping, sodomizing , and strangling Stephanie Rene Schmidt, another recent parolee brutally murdered another Pittsburg State University coed. This time, a paroled killer forcibly entered the apartment of the young college student a block from campus. He beat her, attempted to rape her, tied her to a chair, and stabbed her to death—to avoid returning to prison, he would later say. He had been drinking heavily and was on drugs, he was full of rage, and, he later claimed, he could not control overwhelming sexual urges. He stabbed her seven times, after stomping on her chest as she lay on the floor, attempting to strangle her, and breaking her jaw. He then fled to another state. Never had déjà vu been so cruel. At least not in Pittsburg, Kansas, the close-knit community of 17,500, or on the city’s college campus of 6,500 students. Carrie Arlene Williams was born in Parsons, Kansas, on April 27, 1975. She was raised in the Wesley United Methodist Church and attended Parsons schools. She graduated from Parsons High in 1993 and Labette County Community College in 1995, where she was an honors student, a standout softball player, and a record-setting tennis player. After community college she left Parsons and transferred to nearby Pittsburg State University to complete her degree in home economics and fashion merchandising. Carrie was five feet four inches tall, weighed barely 100 pounds, and had blonde hair. As a junior at Pittsburg State, she worked part-time at the local J. C. Penney’s department store. On March 30, 1996, she was less than a month away from her twenty-first birthday on April 27th. Carrie was engaged to Mike, her high school sweetheart, and, just days before her murder , she had called her minister, Reverend J. C. Kelly, to reserve the Wesley United Methodist Church in Parsons for her wedding on March 22, 1997, during what would have been her senior year in college. Like Stephanie Rene Schmidt, Carrie Arlene Williams was young, beautiful , loved, respected, and already a success in life. Her longtime tennis coach 124 Chapter Eleven said of her, “She wasn’t very fast. She wasn’t very big. She just didn’t give up.”1 Indeed, she never did give up in her short life. Not even as she was being murdered. Gary Wayne Kleypas, like Donald Ray Gideon, was not a success. He too had a violent past and a prison record. Kleypas was born on October 8, 1955, in Missouri. He was six feet one inches tall, weighed over 200 pounds, and had brown hair. When Carrie Williams was less than two years old, on January 23, 1977, Kleypas beat to death a seventy-eight-year-old woman in Galena , Missouri. He lived near her and had worked at odd jobs for her. Technically , he beat her to death. Actually, she suffocated on her own blood after he beat her severely in her home, following an unsuccessful sexual assault. He avoided Missouri’s death penalty when a judge found mitigating circumstances . Kleypas had pleaded insanity and had claimed alcohol and drugs were responsible. He was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to thirty years in a Missouri prison. Kleypas was denied parole in August 1984 and was turned down on three subsequent occasions. In October 1992, after serving fifteen years of his thirty-year sentence, he was paroled to Pittsburg, Kansas. He planned to work and enter Pittsburg State University’s Nursing School. He wanted to be a nurse and help others, he said. He immediately resumed his frequent use of alcohol and drugs, however, ensuring that his rehabilitation and commitment to others were both short-lived. In January 1994, less than two years after he was paroled from the Missouri prison, he held his girlfriend hostage and sexually assaulted her in the apartment they shared in Pittsburg, following an argument. The girlfriend informed police that she and Kleypas had been drinking at a Pittsburg bar. She claimed that, on their return to the apartment, Kleypas had lost his temper , put his hands around her throat, threatened her with a knife, and sexually assaulted her. The county attorney was uncertain the girlfriend would make a good witness and declined to prosecute Kleypas on...