Do you know who murdered Alice Cramer and her friend?
Alice Cramer, 47, was found murdered inside her home at 13401 Charlotte Street in Kansas City, Missouri, on October 24, 1996. She was White. When officers arrived, they also found her friend Donald Watson dead in the same house, turning what should have been an ordinary day into a double-homicide scene that has never fully been explained in public.
The official information that has been released paints the broad outline and leaves the rest in shadow: the two were discovered killed in Alice’s residence, and the case was documented under Kansas City Police Department report number 96-121935. Beyond that, details that often anchor a timeline—how long they had been dead before they were found, what may have been taken or disturbed, whether anyone heard or saw something unusual—have not been publicly laid out on the department’s cold-case listing, leaving the public to look at the address and the date and wonder what happened in the hours leading up to the discovery.
Because the case appears on the department’s unsolved-homicides roster decades later, there is no public indication that anyone has been arrested or charged for the killings, and no named suspect is presented in the official summary. The investigation, at least as far as the public record shows, remains open—an unfinished story where the victims’ last moments are known only to whoever entered that house and to the detectives who have carried the file forward through the years.
What remains visible, even in a brief cold-case entry, is the plea for help that still echoes from 1996 into the present: anyone with information is urged to contact the Kansas City Police Department Homicide Unit at 816-234-5140, and anonymous tips can be routed through the TIPS hotline and Crime Stoppers options the department lists for its homicide cases. In the absence of public arrests or a public suspect narrative, the case is defined by that open door—an invitation for a witness, a confidant, or someone who has carried a secret for years to finally speak, and for Alice Cramer’s name to become more than a line in an unsolved ledger.
