Roger Kaempf

Do you know who murdered Roger Peter Kaempf in 1994?
Roger Peter Kaempf, a 33-year-old man originally from Switzerland, was building a life for himself in the United States. By the autumn of 1994, the Swiss national was a resident of Buford, Georgia, living and working far from his European homeland. His travels brought him to Gastonia, a city in the Charlotte metropolitan area of North Carolina, where he checked in as a guest at the Holiday Inn Express on East Franklin Boulevard. Nothing about his stay suggested it would be his last. He was a man in his early thirties, a visitor to the city, whose journey would end in a brutal and still-unexplained act of violence.

The morning of Tuesday, November 15, 1994, began like any other for the staff at the hotel. A housekeeper making her rounds entered the room registered to Roger Kaempf to perform a routine cleaning. Inside, she made a horrifying discovery that would turn the hotel room into a major crime scene. The guest, Mr. Kaempf, was deceased in the bathroom. The scene was disturbing and clearly indicated a violent struggle had taken place. His body was positioned halfway into the bathtub, with his knees resting on the bathroom floor and his upper torso slumped over the side of the tub. His head was submerged in the water. He was still fully clothed.

The Gastonia Police Department was immediately dispatched to the hotel, and detectives began the painstaking work of processing the scene and piecing together the events that led to the homicide. Investigators determined that the initial attack had not occurred in the bathroom where Roger was found. The evidence suggested he was killed in the bedroom of his hotel room before his assailant moved his body in an apparent attempt to stage the scene or conceal evidence.

An autopsy later confirmed the violent nature of his death. The medical examiner found that Roger had suffered significant facial fractures and a large, devastating wound to the back of his head. The injuries were consistent with a vicious beating, and the cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma. The weapon used to inflict the fatal injuries was identified as a hammer. The brutality of the attack left investigators with a chilling crime scene but few immediate leads.

In the days and weeks that followed, detectives worked to establish a timeline of Roger’s final hours, seeking to identify anyone he may have met or interacted with. They looked into his background and his reasons for being in Gastonia, searching for a motive that could explain such a personal and ferocious assault. Was it a robbery that escalated? Did he know his killer? Was he targeted for some unknown reason? Despite their efforts, the investigation stalled. No suspects were ever publicly named, and no arrests were ever made.

For more than two decades, the murder of Roger Kaempf has remained a mystery, a cold case in the files of the Gastonia Police Department. The identity of the person who wielded the hammer in that hotel room in November 1994 is still unknown. The case is a lingering source of pain and unanswered questions for those who knew him, a reminder of a life cut short in a place far from home. As of November 2016, the case remained unsolved, with investigators still hoping that someone, somewhere, holds the key to finally bringing his killer to justice. The Gastonia Police Department continues to seek any information that might shed new light on this decades-old homicide and provide long-awaited closure.