Necrophilic Nigger Crackhead Kenneth Douglas
Sexually Abused Hundreds of Corpses
CINCINNATI - Hamilton County is facing a federal lawsuit over the sexual acts of an employee who worked in its morgue. When someone is murdered in Hamilton County, and the body is sent to the coroner's office for an autopsy, you would trust that body would be safe and protected.
But there is a former employee, who's currently in jail, for sexually abusing corpses.
Now, years later, the families of the victims want relief.
9 News was given exclusive video by a victim's lawyer, who claims the county ignored numerous warning signs. (The video can be viewed in the media player to the left).
"You can't explain the hurt, it's like a zombie, you just have no feelings," said James Appling, the father of one of the victims.
Appling is talking about his murdered daughter, but what made him feel that way is what happened to her after she was killed.
"I thought she would be well-protected and taken care of, respected," said Appling.
Appling's daughter, Charlene, was 24 and pregnant with her second child when she was killed. Charlene was one of the three confirmed corpses Kenneth Douglas abused while he worked in the Hamilton County Coroner's Office.
Douglas admitted to sexually assaulting, Charlene Appling, Karen Range, and Angel Hicks during his time at the morgue, which spanned from 1982-1991. Dr. Frank Cleveland was the coroner during this time.
"I would just get on top of them and pull my pants down," said Douglas.
These crimes did not come to light until years later. It was not until 2008 that DNA from the victims was linked to Douglas. He was indicted, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison.
But even back then Hamilton County had a hard time explaining it.
"I can't explain this at all," said Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters.
Douglas' wife claims she called the morgue supervisor about her husband smelling like alcohol and....
"I told him we're down to one car so I'm driving him to work and picking him up. He gets undressed and he wreaks of ____" said Kenneth Douglas' wife.
The victim's attorney put it in terms that we can publish: "Her husband was also coming home from work as she put it, smelling like sex," said attorney Al Gerhardstein, one of the family's attorneys.
Douglas' wife claims the morgue supervisor, told her to stop calling.
"He said, 'Whatever happens on county time and on county property is county business,'" said Douglas' wife.
Douglas says he committed these crimes because he was under the influence of drugs and alcohol on the job.
"If I hadn't had anything to drink when I went to work, it wouldn't happen. I would do crack and go in and drink and go in," said Douglas.
And even he isn't sure how many corpses he abused.
"Could have been a 100," said Douglas.
Gerhardstein claims that the county ignored the warning signs.
"The county had plenty of notice that Douglas was coming to work and was present at work while he was under the influence of alcohol and drugs. Had he been stopped these women would not have been abused," said Gerhardstein.
The families of the three victims are suing Hamilton County because their loved ones bodies were in the custody of the morgue.
"This is a time that you do expect that the county will hold your loved one safely. This abuse happened on the county watch by a county employee and that is just terrible," said Gerhardstein.
A morgue employee who worked with Douglas testified that he would bring live women in at night and have sex with them.
This is the fourth time the county has been sued for failing to protect bodies in the morgue. The county could have another multi-million dollar lawsuit on its hands.
We reached out to Hamilton County for comment on the case and they provided the following statement:
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-----------------Considerably More Graphic Account With Background Details Below---------------
The depths of depravity to which human beings will sink fills me with disgust and loathing. Sometimes there are people so evil and off the charts that the depths to which their urges will sink and the lengths to which they will go to satisfy them are truly unbelievable.
Kenneth Douglas - Joseph Steffen - Karen Range
On August 19, 1982, a genetic mistake was slithering around in his pus-filled skin suit masquerading as a human male – David Joseph Steffen. He came across pretty 19-year-old Karen Range, and decided that she was just the victim he was looking to rape. Stalking her to her Roselawn home, he knocked on her door posing as a door-to-door cleaning supply salesman.
He forced his way in when she answered, and began his vicious assault on her. The battering her body withstood was remarkable. Armed with his fists and a paring knife, he nearly decapitated the poor girl. Her half-stripped bloodied form was later discovered by the one person who loved her more than life itself – her mother, Laurie.
Laurie called the police and she was told not to approach her daughter’s body – it was now a crime scene, you see.
The detectives and the crime scene crew arrived; they did their CSI magic and Karen’s body was taken away in a black body bag. She was delivered to the Hamilton County Coroner’s Office some time around midnight on August 20, 1982, to await the coroner and his morning autopsy routine. She would be analyzed and clues would be tweezed from her remains.
Karen was booked in to the county morgue by one Kenneth Douglas. Kenny had been working at the morgue since 1976 and supplemented his income by moonlighting at various local funeral homes. He would continue to work in this rather gruesome field until 1992. In fact, he was working part-time at Jamison & Jamison Funeral Home in addition to his job as morgue attendant at the Hamilton County Coroner’s Office.
In the morning, the coroner performed his autopsy as required by state law for all murder victims, on what was left of Karen Range. In his examination, he noted the multitude of knife wounds piercing her body, in particular, drawing attention to the devastating neck injury which had left the head precariously attached to body by the slenderest proportion of cartilage and tissue.
Her body sustained large garish bruises, and blood was dried and caked over her remains. Karen Range, he noted, had been sexually assaulted at some point and he used the standard rape kit to gather evidence in the form of seminal fluid from Karen’s body. In 1982, the best law enforcement could expect from forensic science at this point was identification of the contributor through blood typing of the bodily fluids.
In this case, a suspect was found and the blood typing indicated that David Steffen was potentially the contributor of the semen inside Karen Range’s body based on the results.
When the case went to trial in 1983, it was anything but easy for Laurie Range to attend and tolerate as the defense attorney did his best to vilify her daughter and basically re-victimize her all over again. Difficult to hear was the carnage Steffen wrought on Karen. And then there was the rape evidence, the motive for his attack. But Steffen denied the rape, it was all part of the defense’s “SODDIT” strategy (Some Other Dude Did IT).
Thankfully, the defense didn’t work. By murdering and raping Karen Range, David Steffen became eligible for Ohio’s death penalty under its “special circumstances” provisions which states that anyone convicted of committing a murder and one other felony can face the death penalty in the punishment phase.
Steffen was found guilty and the jury decided he should pay for his crimes: he won the death penalty.
Steffen felt that he didn’t deserve the judgment and so he would spend the next twenty-five years fighting the death penalty conviction on the grounds that, hey, yes, he admitted murdering Karen Range, but he never raped her. It seems that once she was dead, he just couldn’t follow through.
The tough break for him is that no one believes murdering psychopaths. He was sitting on death row and it was due to the fact that the blood test they used with the semen could not exclude him from being the contributor to the specimen found.
David Joseph Steffen OWNED that special circumstance.
Or he did until March 1, 2007. It was on this date that the test results were back. As part of Steffen’s many appeals against his death penalty conviction, the prosecutor’s office ran the DNA sample from Karen’s crime evidence against the DNA sample Steffen provided.
The results were sent to the lab and came back to the prosecutor. And guess what?
It said David Steffen was not the contributor of the semen found in Karen Range. So I guess the murdering psychopathic piece of shit was telling the truth.
Indeed, the results were a real puzzle now, so much so that they decided to take the DNA sample from Karen’s fiancée and run them against the sample – again, no match.
Steffen’s lawyer is now demanding a whole new trial for his client. I mean, if he was telling the truth about the rape, then maybe he could start saying he didn’t really kill her, right?
Fortunately, Laurie Range has been assured that Steffen isn’t going to get a new trial as the bastard had already confessed, in detail, to murdering her daughter. He’s only going to get a new trial on the penalty portion of his punishment and the worst would be that he didn’t get the death penalty again but rather sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Those are his only two options.
But you know what? There is always a silver lining. In the state of Ohio, if you commit and are convicted of murder and one other felony, then you are eligible for the death penalty. Okay, so he didn’t rape Karen, but he’s still guilty of attempted rape, and oh, yes, he was convicted of aggravated burglary as well. So there – he’s still guilty of murder and a felony still despite years of whining and bitching.
He could still get another death penalty judgment, and I’m going to be optimistic and hope for the best. 🙂
All of this background is necessary to set the stage for our latest candidate of hell-worthiness. It concerns the mysterious contributor of the DNA.
Karen Range had been a virgin when Steffen murdered her. She was a sweet girl who was saving herself for her fiancée – her mother knew it, her family knew it, her friends knew it. The defense scum, I mean, defense lawyer implied that Karen was a loose lady, that she had, in fact, been sexually active, despite evidence and testimony to the contrary.
Well just how do you explain the semen found? That’s the kicker.
And it totally sucks that Karen Range would have to be victimized twice.
Enter Kenneth Douglas, Hamilton County Coroner morgue attendant. He looks pretty average, wouldn’t you say? Of course, given his vocation in life involves working with the dead, one would expect these people to somehow look morose all the time — how else can you work surrounded by death every day and not look sad?
Heck, I have to say I am glad that there are people out there who don’t mind working with the deceased. Think about it – morticians, coroners, pathologists, mortuary workers, funeral directors, and all sundry personnel who make the business of death a thriving industry. There was a cable reality show on a few years ago to let America know that these people have screwed up lives just like everyone else. It was called Family Plots.
And heck, leave it to Hollywood to put a rather stylized spin on the daily drama one would supposedly find in a coroner’s office with Quincy, M.E. And neither of these televised shows covered Kenneth’s problem, but I suppose that would be too much even on a cable station. But honestly, working with the dead is definitely not for everyone.
You see, Kenneth Douglas is the proud depositor of the semen found in Karen Range. Kenneth Douglas is a necrophile. I’ll wait a few minutes while you ponder this edifying revelation.
Yes, Karen Range had been brutally and viciously attacked by David Joseph Steffen only to fall prey to another piece of evil after death.
Once the crime scene team had finished their stint in Karen’s home and placed her in the body bag, they transported her remains to the Hamilton County Coroner’s Office shortly after midnight, August 20, 1982. It was 29-year-old Kenneth Douglas who booked her into one of the refrigerated slabs in the morgue to ostensibly wait for the medical examiner’s morning autopsy.
Well, that was the plan anyway.
The morgue was under the tipsy stewardship of Dr. Frank Cleveland. He ran the place for thirty years (1964 to 1994) prior to retiring to Florida. During his tenure, it was fairly common knowledge that he had a drinking problem and bottles of 40 proof courage stuffed in his office desk.
Hiring like-minded employees to work for him, he soon had a full complement of less than honorable employees. Parties (!) were often held, with morgue workers frequently having females come to the work place and have sex with them. Drugs and alcohol flowed freely and many irregularities occurred.
In the state of Ohio, this one little county morgue has cost the taxpayers big time. In 2001, they paid $5.25 million in settlement because of the coroner’s policy of removing corneas from bodies without family permission.
In 2007, $8 million was paid to make a lawsuit go away: the coroner allowed a photographer access to the bodies in his possession for his art project. He posed ordinary objects on/next/in dead bodies and took photographs of the resulting image. Picture it: an automobile accident victim, your daughter, on a morgue slab with a telephone placed on her stomach. Page 25 of this yo-yo’s art book.
In 2007, $6 million was paid to make another lawsuit go away: this was over whether the coroner could take body parts without permission from family members. Many people do not realize a black market exists where dead bodies are sold, in parts or whole, to medical research facilities throughout the world and that a “prime” cadaver can fetch over $100,000.
But as crazy and as far-out as most employees were, Kenneth Douglas was without question one-of-a-kind. At least, that what the Prosecutor Joe Deters is hoping for. What’s Joe’s opinion of Kenneth Douglas?
“This guy’s just a pig. I can’t explain why someone would do something like this. … This is off-the-charts weird.”
Still, Joe’s feelings are in line with Assistant Prosecutor Mark Piepmeier, who said:
“He ought to be tortured and put to death.”
Harsh words, yes.
Kenny liked to party with women, booze and drugs too. It’s just his women were dead.
Who knows when it first started? Kenneth claims he doesn’t remember as he has said that his years spent working with the dead are a hazy alcohol-filled zone in his memory. Convenient. And, psychologically speaking, untrue.
On August 20th, shortly after midnight, Karen was ensconced in her slot, but she was not to be left “resting in peace.” Ol’ Kenny decided that Karen Range looked good enough to him and had sex with her corpse.
The girl, lovely in life, was covered in blood. Gaping wounds, still fresh from the frenzied attack mere hours before, marred her body.Her head remained attached by the slightest of tendons as Steffen had nearly decapitated her.
Douglas, however, seemed to be unperturbed by the trauma her body had sustained.
Or maybe, as some have speculated, it was because of the trauma her body had sustained that he had an overwhelming desire to have sex with her.
It turns out that Karen Range was not the only body on which Kenneth Douglas released his perversions.
Kenneth Douglas worked for the coroner’s office from 1976 to 1992. During that time, he was moonlighting at several funeral homes in the area. Such dedication to his job is not surprising for those afflicted with necrophilia.
And despite protestations to the contrary, the paraphilia presents itself as early as age 10 or 11. If it is undetected and left untreated, then the necrophile develops into a serious threat for the community in which he/she lives. You see, necrophilia is a sexual deviation and perversion that cannot be cured and sure as hell isn’t normal.
It is next to impossible to detect the disorder because the person will appear completely normal. There are no obvious behavioral clues to look for, no behavioral patterns that provide a clue such as one can observe with pedophiles. As one would expect, there are precious few studies in this area as the subject is even more taboo than pedophilia.
Like pedophilia, it is incurable. It can be controlled, but it can never be eradicated. Medical professionals insist that the person afflicted must undergo intense therapy to understand what motivates the “drive” and only then can the person learn to control it.
According to criminal psychologist Dr. Stuart Bassman, necrophilia is a serious mental disorder:
“Necrophilia is a subset of a paraphilia … mental disorders that are typified by someone engaging in behavior where they take advantage of an unsuspecting victim…..[and necrophiles are like]..chameleon(s) where they’re able to adapt and assimilate into the community…when they’re in a position where they have access, they take advantage and they exploit and abuse someone…”
Necrophiles can be treated, but the disorder is forever. Dr. Bassman says that it is a variation of pornography.
“There is a sense that the person in their mind is having a very endowed fantasy life. So, to a great extent, in their mind they are having an intimate sexual relationship with someone.”
Dr. Bassman added that necrophiliacs act out their fantasies because it’s a protection against being rejected or abandoned.
“This person is not going to leave them. This person is not going to report them.”
Asked if a person could commit multiple offenses of corpse abuse, he said “definitely.” This is a repetitive compulsion that someone acts out over the course of their lives. This is a very serious mental disorder that is treatable, but not curable.
To give you some idea of the strength of paraphilia and what it would be like for Kenneth Douglas to work in funeral homes and morgues, it is the equivalent to having a male pedophile in charge of a pre-school day care center with absolutely no monitoring at all and victims that cannot speak.
Nice picture.
To those who feel sorry for him, forget it. He refuses to own up to the fact he’s even got a problem. Kenny says he doesn’t remember and that he only did it because he was using alcohol and drugs. He not only denies he has any problem; he stated in court that had he not used drugs and alcohol, then he would never have done such things.
We know Kenneth Douglas was a little odd, so it should be no surprise that he did not quit his job in the usual way either. In 1992, one day he just left work and never came back. No call. No letter saying he was quitting. Nothing. At the age of 39, he just stopped showing up to work and that was it.
So how did they know about Kenneth Douglas being the contributor?
We know he up and quit in 1992 at 39 years of age, so he must have gone on to other work, right? I mean, no one can exist in this day and age without some sort source of income. He did not win the state lottery, inherit from a long-lost relative or invent something worthwhile. He did get married in 2005 to Brenda Simmons, but it wasn’t a marriage for money.
The clue as to how he was making ends meet may be in his criminal charge and conviction on March 17, 2008: it was for drug trafficking.
As part of his conviction, he was ordered to provide a DNA sample to the state of Ohio’s DNA database. That’s how they caught him.
Whenever the database is updated, there are hundreds of “pending” samples that get run against the new data. The DNA from Karen Range was one of those “pending” samples and BING! We have a hit.
Now I’m sure that they were wondering like heck as to HOW his DNA got inside Karen Range. In 1982, Kenneth Douglas would have been 29 years old. It is extremely unlikely he would have been dating Karen, but I’m sure that the possibility must have been at least something to consider.
But no. It wasn’t a dating thing. Laurie Range was correct: her daughter had been a virgin and she had died a virgin.
At first, when he was being interviewed by Prosecutor Joe Deters, he was asked how his DNA could show up from evidence collected from a murder victim. Kenneth volunteered that he did work at the county morgue as an attendant in 1982. Well, they knew that much already.
So again, they asked him if he could think of a way as to how his DNA could get there. After all, DNA technology was not available in 1982, but it was certainly a respected science by 2008. He was told that basically the finger of God was pointing at him as the contributor of the DNA.
Wall of silence.
Deters explained about the DNA sample and that it was semen collected from inside Karen Range.
Still nothing.
Finally, tired of the silent treatment, Prosecutor Deters told Kenneth that either he was there with Steffen when Karen Range was murdered, or something happened at the morgue.
Kenny decided to tell the truth. Funny what it can take to get people to open up.
When asked how often he may have done this sort of thing, he assured them that no more than half a dozen time, at the most, in all the time he worked there and at the funeral homes.
So Deters had the answer to the mystery DNA. He sent two detectives to Laurie Range’s Florida home to tell her that her daughter’s reputation would no longer be sullied by Steffen’s legal dogs – Karen Range had died a virgin. She was pleased that they could prove it, but what about the semen – how did it get there?
Now there’s a job I wouldn’t want. Telling this poor mother that once her daughter’s body was in the city’s custody, a city employee sexually assaulted it.
But it was about to get worse.
To the first crime identified, the assault on the remains of Karen Range four hours after she was admitted into the morgue, Kenneth Douglas plead no contest. The judge found him guilty as charged to abuse of a corpse and also violation of his parole. He was sentenced to three years – one year for the abuse and desecration of a corpse and two years for violating the terms and conditions of his parole stemming from the drug conviction.
This is when the citizens of Cincinnati discovered that the dearly departed were afforded very little in terms of protection against any kind of abuse. It was a fifth level felony – the lowest classification – and the maximum time for those guilty was one year in prison.
Butler County Sheriff Richard K. Jones was so outraged that he campaigned until one Democrat and one Republican drafted a bill for the state’s legislature to amend the penalty to at least five years in prison.
It must have crossed the mind of someone, but exactly how gross did everyone feel once they realized that this Kenneth Douglas was the same Kenneth Douglas that worked in the coroner’s office in 1982?
Once the prosecutor had the information regarding the DNA match to Karen Range and Kenneth Douglas, his team went back over the years Douglas worked at the coroner’s office and determined if any of the cases had viable bodily fluids which could be checked for DNA. Due to decomposition and the time elapsed, it turns out that there were just twelve such cases that could be tested – of these, two were covered in Douglas’s DNA.
One victim was 23-year-old Charlene Edwards Appling, who was 6-months pregnant when she was strangled by the drug dealer she was with, Mark Chambers, who mistakenly thought she had taken his crack cocaine. Of the family she left behind, her little boy was taken in by her sister, who also had the unpleasant task of identifying her body. She was delivered to the morgue, and violated, on October 1, 1991.
Oh, and Chambers was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in Charlene’s death and was released on parole in 2000.
The second victim was 24-year-old Angel Hicks. She died of blunt force trauma to the head, and although her death was ruled a homicide, the defendant in that case walked – acquitted at trial. She was delivered to the morgue, and violated, on December 8, 1991.
So let’s see now, Karen Range was violated in 1982 and these two women were violated in 1991. That leaves nine long years of questions.
Investigators went back to Kenneth Douglas for a more frank and detailed discussion. Based on what he eventually told investigators, they know he violated dozens and dozens during his 16-years of unlimited access to the dead.
He told them that he was out of control and, if his frank confession is to be believed, then victims number over one hundred. It is, however, a matter of proof. As the prosecutor said, it is one thing to have a criminal confess; it is another thing to prove it in a court of law.
Kenneth said he was out of control and that sex with corpses happened all the time and any chance he could get. In essence, exactly what psychologists state will happen with this disorder actually happened. It is an overwhelming compulsion that cannot be managed by oneself. It can take over a person’s life, and from Kenny’s confessions, it sounds as though that is exactly what happened.
The court date for the crimes on Appling and Hicks meant another appearance for Kenny. In 1991, it just so happens that the punishment for corpse abuse was reduced so when Kenneth was sentenced,, he was asked if he wanted the harsher sentence or the reduced penalty. Well, DUH, he chose the lower sentence as punishment.
At this hearing, he pleaded guilty to both counts. He said he wanted to spare his family and the families of the victims further trauma that a trial would entail. He used this court appearance to state that:
“There is no excuse for my crime. If I wasn’t under the influence, this never would have happened.”
Nope. No excuse. And then he gives one.
Aside from giving an excuse, thereby sidestepping acceptance of responsibility, he is denying the problem he has. It isn’t merely a case of someone being too inebriated or too high to know what they are doing. He was having sex regularly with the corpses he was entrusted with. Kenneth Douglas was, for at least sixteen years, a practicing necrophiliac.
While in jail, he has been receiving alcohol and drug counseling, but absolutely no help for his necrophilia. As we know, it is a strong drive which is dangerous if left untreated.
The truth is that there are many, many victims, but the prosecutor cannot charge him for these crimes – there is no evidence. Deters said that estimates from Kenneth went as high as a hundred, so he’s sure that there are more victims, but the bottom line is that they would need to have samples from every female victim that he ever had contact with from 1976 to 1992, and there is just no way that they could possibly get that evidence. Aside from decomposition and the time involved, there would be the logistics of exhuming all those bodies and getting legal releases and the lab work and so on.
It is a monumental task just thinking about the victims – and for what? Re-traumatizing the families?
The media frenzy did not parlay into frank discussion of a long-taboo subject. Only a handful of articles attempted to delineate the problem the community was grappling with. Those articles often left more questions than answers with regards to a necrophile working at the county morgue. Deters was left with nothing to say when his phone was ringing off the hook from people calling and asking, “Was my loved one violated?”
All he could say was, “I honestly don’t know.”
But for this little notorious coroner’s office, the end result is a little more than bad news – it’s a financial catastrophe.
Once the families had time to process the news, they got angry. When they investigated a little more, they learned that the tenure of madcap Dr. Frank Cleveland had created a thoroughly despicable atmosphere to which they had unknowingly subjected their loved ones’ remains to. And that it was public knowledge. Booze flowed freely, late night escapades with girlfriends and hookers alike dropping by to have sex with workers on the premises, drugs bought and sold, and, more troubling, Douglas having sex with female corpses.
In Laurie Range’s words, “How dare he!”
As such, the families who share this unwanted distinction of being victims of Kenneth Douglas, have joined forces to sue the pants off the county – the retired coroner, Kenneth Douglas and the Coroner’s office have all been named in the suit and they are seeking unspecified damages for the pain and suffering Douglas’ actions have caused.
Furthermore, the workplace environment created by Cleveland allowed this type of abuse to happen, so he is named front and center as being the root cause of the dereliction of duty scenario that occurred.
The families are seeking unspecified damages, and while they say that money is not the concern, the end result should be.
They had faith that the county would care for their loved ones and prepare them for final internment. Their faith was betrayed in a most vile manner. Their trust has been broken and they want to see something changed, something done to prevent this from ever happening to anyone else’s loved ones ever again.
At the sentencing for abuse of Edwards and Hicks, the judge gave Kenneth Douglas the maximum sentence possible under current legislation: three years (1.5 years per corpse). The judge summed up the community’s feelings when she said:
“There’s a reason we say ‘the dearly departed’ and ‘may they rest in peace.’ What happened he(re) isn’t even primitive. It’s depraved and inhumane.”
We can only hope it is a little more rare occurrence than it turned out to be in Ohio.
http://pysih.com/2010/08/12/david-joseph-steffen-and-kenneth-douglas/
Also:
http://irateirishman.com/blog/?p=12965
....and this time, Hymie - We Go Vertical!