In the spring of 1990, Kimberly Dawn Kendall, a 22-year-old newlywed, was building a life full of promise in Amarillo, Texas. Known as Kim, she was a bright and ambitious young woman who worked as a secretary while also attending college. She and her husband had their whole lives ahead of them, but their future was brutally stolen on May 4, 1990, when Kim was murdered inside the sanctuary of her own home.
The shocking discovery was made by her husband, who returned to find a horrific scene that would forever alter his life and devastate their families.
Kimberly’s life was taken by David Bruce Morton, a man who lived nearby and would later be identified as a serial killer. The investigation into the violent death of the young student and secretary revealed she had been both strangled and stabbed. Morton, a convicted armed robber with a criminal past, had moved to Amarillo from Santa Fe, New Mexico, leaving behind a trail of violence that had not yet been connected. His time in Amarillo was short, but it was long enough to bring tragedy to the Kendall family.
The path to justice for Kimberly began with a crucial piece of evidence. Investigators lifted a fingerprint from the scene of a previous burglary at Kim's apartment. This fingerprint matched David Bruce Morton and was instrumental in his arrest. While this initially led to a life sentence for Morton as a habitual offender for the burglary, it placed him squarely in the sights of detectives investigating Kim's murder. In 1993, Morton was convicted of the murder of Kimberly Dawn Kendall and sentenced to 174 years in a Texas prison.
For years, Morton’s capture was seen as justice for one horrific crime in Texas. However, investigators in Santa Fe, New Mexico, were still grappling with unsolved murders that bore a chilling resemblance to Kimberly's case. In 1996, police noted the striking similarities between the way Kendall was killed—with stab wounds to the back and neck—and the 1983 murder of 22-year-old Janet Benoit and the 1984 murder of 25-year-old Teri Mulvaney in Santa Fe. This connection turned the man known for one murder into the suspect of a series, earning him the moniker "The Santa Fe Strangler."
The full scope of Morton's depravity came to light in 2003 when, confronted with the evidence linking him to the New Mexico cases, he confessed to killing both Janet Benoit and Teri Mulvaney. In 2004, he pleaded guilty to these murders, adding New Mexico life sentences to the life term he was already serving in Texas. Before his move to Amarillo, Morton had been a suspect in Mulvaney's murder—she was his neighbor—and was even tried in 1988, but the jury deadlocked, allowing him to walk free and kill again.
David Bruce Morton is now serving multiple life sentences for the murders of Kimberly Kendall, Janet Benoit, and Teri Mulvaney. He is also suspected of killing several other young women. For the family of Kimberly Dawn Kendall, the legal resolution brought a measure of closure, but nothing could fill the void left by the loss of a vibrant young woman whose life was just beginning. Her death was not an isolated tragedy but the final confirmed act in a string of brutal killings by a predator who moved from one city to another, leaving sorrow and unanswered questions in his wake.
