McKeesport cold case gets attention online
A death more than 16 years ago in McKeesport is drawing national attention.
The producers of NBC's “Dateline,” seen locally on WPXI-11, posted an item on the death of Kimberlie Krimm in its “cold case spotlight” this past weekend.
“When 14-year-old Kimberlie Krimm went missing, it was straight out of a parent's nightmare,” reads the item posted Sunday on an NBC News website. “The teen left her home to a visit a friend and buy hair dye when she vanished on June 30, 1998.”
Her decomposing body was found six days later on a hillside near McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery by a Duquesne Light contractor. That decay prevented what then was the Allegheny County Coroner's office from determining a cause of death.
“Police say all leads have been exhausted and the case now rests on someone coming forward with information,” a network graphic says.
“Dateline” is an NBC newsmagazine that focuses on mysteries. The episodes aired on WPXI-11 over the weekend focused on other cases.
Though it officially remains a mystery how she died, her mother Jeanie Krimm believes she was murdered.
Jeanie Krimm seeks to keep the case alive through such means as the “Who Killed Kimberlie Krimm” group page on Facebook, which also aims to comfort others going through similar situations.
As of Monday the page had 3,895 members. Jeanie Krimm provided a link to the NBC posting but wrote that she was surprised by it.
NBC's posting of the cold case item on its Facebook page drew more than 1,000 likes during a 24-hour period and at least 1,148 shares.
The NBC report drew on a story written by Trib Total Media staff writer Eric Slagle in the July 6, 2013, edition of The Daily News after family members and friends gathered to mark the 15th anniversary of Kimberlie's death.
The article quoted Tom Greene, now assistant chief of the McKeesport police department, who thought in 2013 that investigators had followed all leads as far as they could take them.
“Everything that could have been done was done,” Greene said. “There really wasn't much to go on.”
The NBC producers posted a telephone number for McKeesport police (412-675-5015) and referred viewers in the transcript to Allegheny County police (412-473-3000).
The “cold case spotlight” was not the first national — or international — treatment of the story.
In 2011 an episode of A&E's “Paranormal State” was dedicated to Krimm's memory as it followed a Penn State University-based society in probing allegations that a Pittsburgh area location was haunted “by a teen girl who was murdered.”
Another treatment came briefly in a British documentary on Tanya Kach, who was held captive by former McKeesport Area middle school security guard Thomas Hose from 1996-2006.
“I knew her, I was good friends with her older sister,” Kach told British interviewers in 2012 for a Channel Four documentary aired in the fall of 2013 for American viewers by Investigation Discovery.
Hose pleaded guilty in 2007 to multiple charges in Kach's disappearance and was sentenced to five to 15 years in state prison.
Patrick Cloonan is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. He can be reached at 412-664-9161, ext. 1967, or pcloonan@tribweb.com.
