Episode 138: The Murder of Michele Lafond
21-year-old Dina Kichler
In December of 1997, retired Portsmouth, New Hampshire Police Captain James Tucker was attending a conference on cold cases down in St. Petersburg, Florida. While sitting in on a seminar presented by an investigator with the Naval Investigative Service on the unsolved murder of Dina Kichler, James was struck with a realization.
Dina was just 21-years-old at the time of her murder, and she had started a new life in Mayport, Florida with her husband Pat, who was a military officer, and their 2-year-old son. On December 3rd, 1990, Dina didn’t show up to her job at an optics store in Jacksonville, Florida, where she worked at the front desk. Dina was known as being a reliable worker, and when she didn’t show up to work her friend and coworker Amy Stark called her landline at her apartment in a military family complex. When she didn’t answer, Amy went to her home and found her car still parked in the driveway.
Police were called to check on her and the responding officer found blood in the foyer and signs of a struggle. He immediately called the homicide unit after following a trail of blood upstairs and finding a human foot sticking out from underneath a pile of blankets and clothing in the master bedroom. Homicide detectives arrived on scene and took note of the significant amount of blood splatters in the room, as well as clumps of dark hair scattered around the apartment. One clump of hair was found wedged into a hole by the staircase leading up to the loft bedroom, and a large amount of hair was next to the bathtub. It was clear that it had been chopped off. Even though there were signs of a struggle inside the foyer of the apartment, there were no signs of forced entry.
Underneath the pile of blankets in the bedroom was the badly beaten body of Dina Kichler. She had been sexually assaulted and then strangled with a rope. Detectives had discovered a snuffed-out cigarette in the bathroom in a bloody boot print as well as three hair samples that were determined to be pubic, inner thigh and leg hairs embedded within the linens that Dina’s body was wrapped in.
Her husband was deployed at this time so he was immediately ruled out as a suspect, and police began their search by speaking to three of Dina’s coworkers from the optics store where she worked. They were described as being “infatuated” with Dina, but all three men who were interviewed were not a match to the hair samples found at the crime scene.
James Tucker listened to the presentation about Dina’s case and told the presenting investigator that the details were eerily similar to the unsolved murder of Michele Lafond. Michele was just 23-years-old and lived in Dublin, New Hampshire, a small rural town of just 2,000 people at the time. She was a college student and was hoping to become a paralegal. Her body was found on March 4th, 1987, in the upstairs bathroom of her home. She had been sexually assaulted and badly beaten before being strangled with an electrical cord. Her husband came home and found her body and immediately called police. She was four months pregnant when she was killed.
When detectives arrived on scene to Michele’s home, they found clumps of her dark hair scattered around the home with the largest amount in and around the bathtub. The perpetrator had cut off handfuls of her hair. The home was also in a state of disarray, indicating that there had been a struggle before Michele was killed. There were also ligature marks on her wrists and ankles that indicated that she had been tied up and bound.
When teams from Dina and Michele’s cases got together, everyone was struck by the fact that the two women looked so much alike. Mike Monroe, a homicide detective who worked on Dina’s case, stated “The similarities in both cases were both of them being very attractive young women, both of them had black hair, almost the same length [and] both of them had the same color eyes. If you held pictures of both of them up side by side you’d think they were sisters. Both of them had their hair chopped off, both of them had puncture wounds identical from New Hampshire to Jacksonville.”
As the teams began to work together, it was revealed that Jacksonville police had a suspect who they actually arrested for Dina’s murder, but had to let go: a man named John Brewer. He worked as a painter for the Mayport Naval Station and knew both Dina and her husband Pat well. It was not uncommon for him to babysit their son and he promised Pat that he would “look after Dina” while he was away at sea. After questioning him, he admitted to police that he had been inside Dina’s apartment before her murder. John told them that he was thinking about renting an apartment at that same complex and wanted to get a look at the floor plans. During his interview, police took note of the cuts and scratches to John’s hands and the fact that he smoked the same brand of cigarettes as the cigarette found at the scene of Dina’s murder.
Police had John give them hair samples, but these came back inconclusive. It was determined that John had intentionally given police hair samples from different parts of his body than the samples found at the scene to throw them off before fleeing. It took police almost a year to locate John to get new samples, and these were a match. On December 12th, 1991, John Brewer was arrested and charged with the murder of Dina Kichler. On November 3rd, 1993, John was released after Circuit Judge Lawrence Haddock ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence to hold him without bond. They feared that because John admitted to being in the apartment on the day of Dina’s murder, a good defense attorney could write that off and explain that that was the reason why his hairs were found at the scene of the crime. The State Attorney’s office dropped the charges in 1994.
Now working together, police in Florida and New Hampshire teamed up and started looking into John again. New Hampshire police found that they also knew John Brewer, as he had an extensive criminal history in the state, and he had been living there at the time of Michele’s murder. He also was a coworker and friend of Michele’s husband, Gary Lafond.
Police were able to match DNA found in semen recovered from Michele’s crime scene to the hair follicles found in Dina’s case. The semen sample matched the hair samples, and the two belonged to John Brewer. He was arrested for the murders of Michele Lafond and Dina Kichler in April of 1998, and over the summer of 1999 was sentenced to two life sentences after pleading guilty to both murders. He pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Dina Kichler plus 7 to 15 years on a sexual battery charge at a hearing in Florida on June 29th, 1999. He was then extradited to New Hampshire for a hearing the next day for the murder of Michele Lafond, where he was sentenced to life in prison. He pled guilty to avoid the death penalty and remains in prison.
Image sources:
findagrave.com - “Michele Lambert Lafond”
oxygen.com - “Navy Spouse Raped, Murdered In Florida After Her Husband Is Deployed For 6 Months”