Richard Grissom

In August 1999, a team of searches from NecroSearch inc. scoured a landfill near Clinton Lake after theories about the women's bodies being buried there emerged. However, the search turned up no results. In 2010 The Wichita Eagle daily newspaper erroneously wished a happy birthday to Grissom, who had turned 50. This was seen by many as inappropriate, but the newspaper agency responded by explaining that they received no info about Grissom's background prior to the paper's publishing and that they had been a victim of a prank. In 2017, Grissom was accused of passing a sexually explicit note to a female corrections officer. While Grisson admitted to passing the note, he claimed the woman wanted him to. She denied it, and Grissom was to spend 30 days in segregation. As of 2023, Grissom is currently imprisoned at El Dorado Correctional Facility. He will not be eligible for parole until 2093.

In March 1990, judge Robert Jones lowered Grissom's robbery charges from four counts of aggravated robbery to four counts of simple robbery. On March 14, Grissom entered a not guilty plea to the charges. He went to trial in November. The bodies of the three women were yet to be found, but on November 3, 1990, Grissom was found guilty of all charges. He was therefore sentenced to life in prison. The women's bodies have never been recovered, and Grissom has refused to offer information. He has also refused to offer information about the unsolved June 7, 1989 murder of 25-year-old Terri Renee Maness, a woman he had once dated.

Grissom's case was brought up during the 1990 Kansas gubernatorial election, when Republican governor Mike Hayden, who was seeking re-election, used the case as an example as to why capital punishment should be reinstated in Kansas. Hayden argued that if Grissom had been sentenced to death for the 1977 murder, then he would not have been able to kill the other three women. This sparked controversy as a lot of people, including former governor John William Carlin, pointed out that Grissom could not have received the death penalty at the time because he was a juvenile. Hayden would lose the election to Democratic opponent Joan Finney, but capital punishment was later reinstated in Kansas in 1994. In 1998 it was discovered that Grissom had joined an internet pen pal group dedicated to those incarcerated. Family members of his victims expressed their disappointment that such a website was allowed; Tim Butler, who was the brother of Joan Butler, wrote to the web site operators and said, "the monster Grissom forgot to mention his other hobbies: bludgeoning old ladies with railroad spikes and killing and torturing young women."

On June 8, 1989, Grissom, who presented himself as Randy Rodriguez, rented a storage locker in southern Johnson County, which was to remain his until July 1. Afterwards, in just over a week's span, three young women all in their early twenties went missing in Johnson County. The first of these cases was 24-year-old Joan Marie Butler of Overland Park. On June 18, she visited a friend's house in Kansas City on the Country Club Plaza. That was last time anyone heard from her, as when she failed to show up for work the following day she was reported missing. On June 25, her rental car was spotted at an apartment complex with witnesses recalling seeing a man fleeing the car. In the car police located a single blood stain. The following day two roommates, Theresa Brown and Christine Rusch, both 22, hosted a party which was meant to be a farewell to Brown as she was moving out. The next day, when the two did not show up for work, they were reported missing.

Grissom was released in 1980, and soon after enrolled at Kansas State University. In September Grissom traveled to Manhattan where he applied for the track team. During practice he garnered the nickname "rock man" for the fact that he would fall on almost every jump. By October Grissom quit the track team and instead took up racquetball, where he was regarded as a star competitor. He also took up a job at Arby's. The following year he joined the softball team. In 1982 Grissom was listed in the student directory as a sophomore studying architecture. In November 1982, a month before the final exams, Grissom stole $190 from a Manhattan resume service. He was arrested in January 1983, and two months later pleaded no contest to a theft charge was given a suspended sentence and was placed on a three-year probation. Afterwards Grissom drifted between Kansas City and Manhattan. In 1984 Grissom stole a Mazda RX-7, for which he was sentenced to serve time in prison. In June 1988 he was paroled.

On the morning of January 27, 1977, Grissom left his home after an argument with his parents. Sometime after leaving, he stole a railroad spike, which he used to break into the home of his neighbor, 72-year-old Hazel Meeker. In the house he attacked Meeker, viciously beating her until her death, then left the house. Meeker's granddaughter, Carla, went to visit her grandmother, but found her dead body in a pool of blood. She contacted the police who showed up and conducted an investigation. Police discovered that there were footprints in the snow all around the house, and they subsequently followed the trail which led them to the southern railroad tracks. They continued to follow them until they ended right where Grissom was hiding in a trailer park. When they noticed him, Grissom attempted to bury a handgun he had stolen from another home under the snow, but police handcuffed him before he could.

In police custody, Grissom confessed to the murder and added that he had lost one of his shoes in the creek while running from the home. Police later went back to the area but could not locate it, but took his word as when he was arrested, he was only wearing one shoe. In April 1977 Grissom, since he was 16 years old, was convicted under a juvenile court and was sent to be housed at a Boys Industrial Center in Topeka. In February 1979, Grissom and two other juveniles escaped from the center and were on the run for about a day. During this time they broke into a home in Jefferson County. They were recaptured without resentence, with the superintendent of the youth center filing a juvenile delinquency charge against Grissom.

Richard Anthony Grissom Jr. (born November 10, 1960) is an American serial killer who, over eight days in June 1989, murdered three young women in Johnson County, Kansas. Grissom, who years earlier had been imprisoned for killing his neighbor, was convicted of the three murders and sentenced to life in prison. The bodies of the women have never been found.

Richard Anthony Grissom Jr. was born on an American military installation in South Korea, the son of a US army Seargent and a South Korean woman, on November 10, 1960. Its unknown what his original name was, but soon after his birth his family gave him up to an orphanage, where three years later he was adopted by US army Seargent Richard Grissom Sr. and his wife Fredonia. Afterwards the family moved to the United States. Even there, his new family moved across numerous states before finally settling in Kansas state. Details of his childhood are not exactly known, but after his family moved to Leavenworth in the mid-1970s, Grissom enrolled at Leavenworth High School, where he gained popularity as a friendly, good looking, and smart kid who regularly got As and Bs and was a halfback for his school's football team.