Murder of Kimberly Nees

2021-10-02 19:51:33 Written by Jones Jay

In the early morning hours of June 16, 1979, Kimberly Nees, an 18-year-old who had graduated as valedictorian of her class just the month before, was brutally bludgeoned to death. Police found her truck after daylight just outside of the small town of Poplar, Montana, at a spot famous for partying teens.

 

A blood-dotted route of drag marks led 257 feet from her truck to the Poplar River, where her wounded body was found floating face-up in the shallow water about 10 feet from shore. A post-mortem indicated that she had died as a result of at least 20 blows to the head, with ugly wounds to her neck, shoulders, and hands, made by two metal objects—likely a tire iron and crescent wrench.

 

While Nees’ truck was a bloody mess—spattered inside and outside with blood and clumps of hair, gouges with hair impacted in the ceiling and steering wheel, and beer or urine soaking the driver’s side seat—there wasn’t any proof of robbery or sexual assault. Nees’ sweater was folded neatly in the rear of the truck, and next to it, her purse was undisturbed—a package of cigarettes rested on top. The postmortem showed no signs of recent sexual activity.

 

The truck and the area around it were a treasure trove of proof. More than 24 fingerprints (some documentation states there were 42 sets of prints) were found inside the vehicle, and a bloody palm print—later determined by the FBI to have been left by the murderer-was on the passenger-side door. Footprints from many people surrounded the vehicle and led to the river shore. A bloody towel was found less than a mile from the crime scene. Tests determined that the blood on it didn’t belong to Nees.

However, all that proof resulted in frustratingly few leads. Because the murder had taken place on the Fort Peck Reservation, federal, tribal, and state agencies all contributed to the inquiry. Accusations of sloppy crime scene inquiry tactics, a lack of leadership, and possible contamination of the crime scene and proof plagued the investigation.

 

A Shallow Pool of Suspects

Shortly after the finding of Nees’ body, rumors circulated that her killing was a jealousy killing perpetrated by a group of three or four girls who were jealous of her looks, intelligence, accomplishments, and popularity.

 

Barry Beach, then 17 and a neighbor of the Nees family and a one-time boyfriend of Nees’ younger sister, was one of many people quizzed by police and let go. Shortly afterward, Beach moved to Louisiana, where his father and stepmother resided.

Despite the copious amount of proof and shallow suspect pool—it was a very small town, after all—progress on the case slowed and had all but stopped in the years after the crime.

 

Then, in 1983, four years after Nees’ killing, the case took a turn that would change the focus from the victim to a possible perpetrator.

 

Nearly 2,000 miles away from the scene of the crime, Barry Beach’s stepmother called the police to complain that Beach, now 21, had helped his younger stepsister play hooky from school. He was arrested. The day after his arrest, Beach called his stepmother and threatened to kill her. Frightened, she called the police and reported the threats. She also shared that Beach had been quizzed about a murder in Montana years before. Police, who were interrogating the killings of three women in Monroe, Louisiana—one of whom Beach was thought to have met—brought Beach into the station and investigated him for two to four days (reports vary) about the three murdered women and the killing of Nees. Despite maintaining his innocence at first, days into the inquiry, Beach admitted to killing Nees and the three local victims.

 

He would never be charged with the murders of the Louisiana women because it was assumed that he wasn’t in the state at the time of those killings, but he was charged with the first-degree murder of Nees. He pleaded not guilty and maintained that his confessions in all four murders were coerced—including that detectives had threatened to “fry” him in the electric chair and had made promises to help him beat the murder charge in Montana in exchange for his confession. Despite his allegations, the jury found Beach guilty of Nees’ murder after only six hours of deliberation. He was sentenced to 100 years in prison without the chance of parole.

 

Case closed.

 

A Botched Investigation?

 

Case closed? Maybe not. Because that’s not where this story ends for Beach or the Nees murder case. Beach, his family, and his allies continued to argue that he didn’t commit the crime. Even Nees’ sister, Beach’s former girlfriend, said she couldn’t think he’d done it. Although he did admit to being a heavy drinker and a trouble-prone teen with an earned fame for being quick to anger and having a lead foot, Beach defended his innocence when it came to murder.

 

While unflattering information came out during the trial about Beach and his temper, exceptions in the investigation, interrogation, and trial were pointed out and publicly questioned. A Poplar police officer, the father of one of the girls initially suspected of taking part in the crime, had broken into the evidence room the night after the murder. Because of this, proof stored in that room hadn’t been confessed at trial. The crime lab scientist who testified against Beach was later found incompetent and fired by another state; two other men he’d testified against were wrongly convicted of murder and later exonerated. Besides, none of the physical proof at the scene pointed to Beach—none of the fingerprints, handprints, or shoe prints belonged to him. However, it was declared that the prosecutor minimized evidence that pointed to Beach’s innocence, including the fact that footprints near the truck were made by bare feet and sandals, not the footwear of the police on whom he’d blamed the unaccounted-for prints during the trial.

And while the prosecutor claimed that Beach’s confession included details only the killer would have known, many of those details—including what Nees had been wearing, where her truck was parked, whether or not she was bleeding after the attack, and the way her body had been moved to the river—were proven false or were common knowledge in Poplar. And perhaps conveniently for the prosecution, the confession tape had been erased and jurors had to rely on a transcript written by the prosecutor.

 

Even the police who had investigated Beach in Louisiana had credibility problems. The lead investigator faced many accusations of misconduct before and after Beach’s inquiry. He’s been suspended without pay at least four times, accused of soliciting false testimony, and ordered to undergo neurological testing due to repeated accusations of lying and false testimony. Then there was the fact that the investigators who had elicited the confession from Beach had been involved in inquiries of at least two other men that had later been found to have given false confessions—interestingly, those false confessions were in regards to the Louisiana killings about which Beach had initially been questioned. Additionally, it appeared that information about the Nees murder scene had been fed by Poplar police to the Louisiana detectives, who had misremembered the details and told them incorrectly to Beach, who then recounted those false facts in his confession.

 

But none of those issues or concerns changed the fact that Beach was going to spend the rest of his life in prison.

 

A Second Chance for Beach

Then, in 2000, Centurion Ministries, prisoner advocacy, and the investigative organization took on Beach’s case. They collected evidence, including some that appeared to back up the theory that Nees was killed by a group of jealous peers. Witness statements from the brother and coworker of a classmate of Nees say that classmate implicated herself in the murder, and that she said she had done so because she was jealous that Nees had gone on a date with the father of that classmate’s child. Centurion could not find any physical proof that tied that individual (or two others named in the investigation) to the murder, however. (The names of these women are mentioned in the Dateline special and online. I’ve chosen to leave them unnamed here for privacy reasons.)

 

But Centurion’s efforts weren’t for naught. Despite the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole denying an appeal on behalf of Beach for clemency in 2007, the case earned more attention. Dateline released a special in April 2008, and in late November 2009, the Montana Supreme Court ordered an evidentiary hearing, and Beach was granted a new trial. During a 2011 hearing, a new witness stated that she and a cousin had witnessed the murder as children—and that it was a group of girls who had attacked Nees. She also stated that shortly after the attack a police car had driven down the road, parked near the vehicles of Nees and the girls, turned off its lights, and eventually drove away. She claimed she didn’t call the police because she thought the authorities knew about the fight. Then, after hearing about the murder, she kept her secret for more than 30 years because she was afraid. However, despite this new information, in May 2013, the Montana Supreme Court reinstated Beach’s murder conviction. Eventually, though, in November 2015, after many hearings and appeals, Montana Governor Steve Bullock commuted Beach’s sentence. He was approved to go free on time served with 10 years additional probation.

 

The Aftermath

 

Some still thinkà the commutation of Beach’s sentence was a mistake—that he was Nees’ murderer. And fingers still point at the group of girls—the three or four named as initial suspects. While fingerprints and other evidence haven’t been matched to any of them so far, witnesses state that the girls’ alibis—most said they were at home and in bed—are lies. Witness statements put the girls together just hours before the murder, causing trouble at a local bar. A neighbor also testified that he’d seen a group of people—Nees, four other females, and one male (the genders were details he added in later statements)—in the cab of Nees’ truck at about 2:30 a.m. the morning of the murder. 

 

Coworkersfrom two different workplaces of two of the girls included in the pack-of-jealous-girls scenario later came forward to share that the now-women had admitted to being part of the group that killed Nees and bragged about getting away with it. However, both women refused involvement when questioned by authorities. Additionally, a neighbor of one of those same women proved that she had told him she’d murdered a girl on the reservation and would kill him, too.

 

However, despite all this, there doesn’t seem to be an official appetite or plans to reopen the inquiry.

 

More than 40 years have passed since Kimberly Nees was bludgeoned to death on the outskirts of that tiny Montana town, and they're still seem to be more questions than answers. The legal drama over Barry Beach’s guilty sentence and eventual commutation has, in many ways, overshadowed the victim, and that’s caused Understandable frustration and anger with Nees’ family, friends, and advocates. While the proof remains frozen in time, the chance for justice dwindles with each passing year as potential witnesses and probable perpetrators age—Nees herself would be 59 this year had she survived the brutal attack that ended her life as it was just beginning.