On January 30, 1976, 32-year-old Karen Klaas, (born Karen O’Grady,) the first wife of Righteous Brothers singer Bill Medley, returned to her home on 24th Place in Hermosa Beach, California. She had started the morning by dropping her youngest son, Damien 5, at the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan Beach. Her other child, Darrien Lee Medley, 10 was with her father for the weekend. She planned to join two girlfriends for breakfast. She was on crutches because she broke her leg taking a spin around the driveway on her son's skateboard.
Karen had grown up in Santa Ana, about an hour away and graduated from Santa Ana Senior High School in 1961. She started dating Bill Medley in 1963. “I first noticed her at church” Medley said “and then, when Bobby Hatfield (The other half of the Righteous Brothers) and I unveiled our first single, Little Latin Lupe Lu, at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach, California in 1963, I saw her in the middle of a thousand beautiful young girls. When we got off stage, I got her phone number and we started dating.”
They married and their son Darrin was born in 1965 the same year that the Righteous Brothers had recorded and released You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, a worldwide number one hit.
“ When you have the biggest record in the country everybody wants you, everybody needs you, and they need you now.” Medley said “I went to the hospital to have a minor ailment checked, and the doctor diagnosed mental and physical exhaustion. I was such a wreck Karen had to tell them my name – I couldn’t get it out. She took such good care of me. I’d get home from the studio at 2 or 3 in the morning and she would get up and make me tacos – what a great wife.
“I was on tour with The Beatles” Medley added “when she miscarried.
After the tour with the Beatles ended, the Righteous Brothers landed a contract at the Sands Casino with only served to weaken the marriage even more. “Vegas in those days” Medley wrote “was so exciting and we were just 25; we ate it up. Almost every lounge had a topless revue with the most gorgeous women you can imagine. I had sex with a girl in Frank Sinatra’s suite while he was on stage. Am I proud of that? No, I’m just proud I’m still alive. I’m not sure Frank would have appreciated it. I had another girlfriend who worked in the hotel’s ladies room. Bobby Hatfield and our bandleader Mike Patterson would run all over town looking for chicks after our last show of the night and all I had to do was call the women’s restroom. I’m not too proud of it now, but that was the life of a young performer in Vegas in the Sixties.
Within a few years, Bill Medley’s partnership with Bobby Hatfield was strained and the Righteous Brothers' partnership was drawing to a close. Not surprisingly, divorce also came within five years. “On our final tour” Medley said “I started an affair with the singer Darlene Love. I decided to get a divorce because I thought I was in love and it wasn’t fair to Karen.”
There was an attempt at reconciliation that didn’t work out and by then Karen had moved along and was seeing another man regularly, whom she eventually married, but she and Medley remained amicable.
In 1970 Medley married Suzi Robertson and then Janice Gorham, but both marriages were annulled soon after they began. Between those marriages, he had relationships with singers Mary Wilson and Connie Francis.
On the day Karen was killed in 1976, two neighborhood women watched her pull into her driveway. They wanted to tell her about a stranger, a man, who had been lurking around the neighborhood, but Karen rushed into the house through the backdoor that she always left unlocked, Hermosa beach is a safe place today but in 1976 it was even safer and still just slightly remote from LA.
A while afterward, the two neighbors walked over to her house and rang the doorbell. They could see Karen’s crutches on the floor through the glass. They could also hear whimpering, so they opened the front door and walked into the house but pushed aside by a man who said, ‘Hi girls,’ then walked out of the front door.
The women ran up to the ransacked bedroom, she had tried to fight him off, where they found Karen on the floor, the man had tried to strangle her with her bra and then tried to rape her. She was alive but barely. The strangulation had cut off the oxygen to her brain for 15 minutes. Doctors later told Bill Medley that if she lived, she would be severely brain-damaged. Four days after the attack, she died.
“I was sad and incredibly angry at the same time,” Medley said, “I wanted to find the son-of-a-bitch who) killed (His children’s) mom.”
The description the women gave to the cops was generic at best; they said the man was white, in his late 20s, about 5'7" to 5'9" with brown hair and a beard. The police, working for hours and hours with neighbors who saw the man leave the house created a plaster bust of the suspect, but the likeness brought in no clues. But the crime scene investigators did get several clear sets of fingerprints taken from the house, but a statewide computer system that could match the prints had yet been developed.
The man who raped and murdered Karen was Kenneth Troyer. He was born in Los Angeles in 1946. In 1964, when he was 18, he married another teen named Jeanne Dalton. They were divorced in Linn, Oregon in 1973. A year after he murdered Karen, in 1977, he returned to Oregon and married a woman named Valerie Hickey. He appears to have wandered back to California sometime in early 1980.
Police image of Karen's attacker
In January of 1982, Troyer, age 36, broke out of the minimum security California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, where he was serving a sentence for burglary. Police had been tipped that Troyer would be in the Santa Ana area to meet a Pamela Cuen, 24 at about 12:40 p.m. Sunday at 2208 N. Main St. in Santa Ana, and officers staked out the location. Several days before Troyer had pulled a gun on a police officer and later raped a Huntington Beach woman, then fled in her car.
Police watched Cuen get into the stolen car with Troyer and then swarmed in and demanded Troyer step out of the car, but he sped away. The cops followed and after a short but intense high-speed chase Troyer lost control of the wheel and hit a tree at 17th Street and Cabrillo Avenue in Santa Ana. Troyer and Pamela Cuen climbed out of the car with their hands up but then Troyer suddenly turned and reached back into the stolen car and Police from Santa Ana and Anaheim opened fire hitting Troyer nine times with at least one bullet going directly through his heart.
Karen’s murder would go unsolved for decades, in fact, it was the only unsolved murder in Hermosa Beach history. However, the police and a private detective hired by Medley stayed on the case, tracking down what leads they could. The Sheriff’s office suspected Troyer in Karen’s murder but couldn’t tie him into the murder directly. Investigators were able to get a DNA profile from the crime scene using more advanced technology in the 1990s but could not make a match. In 2009, detectives reopened the case.
Troyer
On January 27, 2017, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department announced that investigators used a controversial DNA testing method called “familiar DNA”, meaning they had DNA from one of Troyer’s family members and were able to prove that Kenneth Troyer had murdered Karen in 1976.
“We miss Karen” Bill Medley “and the most important thing is the boys didn’t get to grow up with their mother,” he said. “She would have been an incredible grandma [as well]. She was a wonderful, wonderful girl.”