My Unintentional Connections to Murderers and Serial Killers - Part 3 - Walter Blair, Jr
When I got out of the Marine Corps in July 1993, I moved in with Mom until I could escape on my own. In the meantime, I had a Commodore 128D home computer and would dial in to some local BBSes using my blazingly fast 1200 baud modem. Yes kids, in the days of yore, we would dial a phone number and someone's computer would answer. You would sign on to the BBS (Bulletin Board System) and could check messages from local users in the area, play online games, email other users on the BBS, or send messages on FidoNet, then hang up and in a few hours later do this again to see if anyone replied to your message. Very cumbersome, yet nostalgic. Commodore computers were pretty much ancient even by this time and PCs were taking over most of the local BBSes. So there were only a handful of Commodore 64 BBSes even available.
One of the few Commodore 64 boards was called Northern Lights BBS out of North Kansas City. I sign on and get various "Welcome to Northern Lights BBS" type of screens, along with such tidbits like "Kansas City's only Free Speech BBS" type of thing. Ok, cool. Then I start perusing the board and very quickly became aware that it was a haven for local racists, the Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazis, etc. And I'm not talking about the modern fake definition of "racist" meaning someone disagreeing with a person of color, one who does not support BLM, or a Trump voter. I am talking these were people who threw certain words around like Rip Taylor tossing confetti, and advocated actual violence. These were the kind of racists that would scare the shit out of some Antifa bad-ass wannabe if they ever ran into them in person. I can't begin to count the number of death threats my friends and I would get from these people, and a little bit of a reason to think they may go through with it. After all, they did have our home phone numbers and addresses. These were some hardcore people with hardcore beliefs.
Maybe a couple weeks into being on this BBS, the Sysop, the locally infamous Klokan, said he was going to attend the execution of Walter Blair Jr., the guy that killed Klokan's sister back in 1979. Sure enough, Klokan said he attended the execution and told us all the details later.
His sister, Kathy Jo Allen was killed by Walter Blair Jr on August 17, 1979. She was a Senior at the Kansas City Art Institute. Earlier that year she was a victim of rape and was going to be a witness at the trial. Leading up to her death, she was getting threatening phone calls telling her not to show up. She was abducted at gunpoint from her apartment, taken to a vacant lot, and shot three times. Walter Blair Jr was apprehended and charged with murder and sentenced to death in the state of Missouri. It was allegedly a murder for hire for a whopping $6000 by Larry Jackson who was the inmate that was accused of raping her months earlier in 1979
What are the odds of being one person away from someone who was executed. Apparently in my case pretty damn good because this is the second person I have known to be executed. But it gets even more strange, because about 10 years later, this guy's brother will become a notorious Kansas City serial killer, and I will know one of the victims.
Oh and a little pointless trivia, while I was reading up on Walter Blair Jr, apparently while on death row he painted a mural that stated, "Death is Certain, But Life is Not". Ok, so he's an artist. In 2015 my wife and I went to Missouri State Penitentiary and we did go to death row. Who knows I may have seen his mural, but truth be told, it was at night and was quite dark. But I'm sure it was amazing piece of art.
Now that I think about it, I still have my Commodore 128D in the basement and I did end up with Klokan's old C*Base Northern Lights BBS software. It would be interesting if I could figure out how to find those old posts from Klokan nearly 30 years later.
Katherine Jo Allen on FindAGrave
Walter Blair Jr. was executed July 21, 1993.
