Infamous ‘Torso-Nurse’ killer, given life, up for parole

Wayne Hetteberg saw a lot as a homicide detective, but he has never shaken off the first look he had at the mutilated corpse of Diane Camm nearly 40 years ago.

A torso with head attached. Eyes colorless because the remains were frozen.

“I immediately called my wife,” Hetteberg recalled. He told her to keep their teenage daughter indoors. There was a killer loose.

“I saw a lot of bodies, but this one was really gruesome. As a human being, you can’t put it aside,” said Hetteberg, now retired and living in Florida. “What he did was macabre.”

It was January of 1977, and Camm, a 22-year-old licensed practical nurse from Fort Thomas, had been strangled. Her killer then used a knife and a chainsaw to dismember her. He dumped her remains in two remote spots in Campbell County.

And one frigid day, a teenage hunter found her torso and head in a snowbank near A.J. Jolly Park.

Her husband, Kevin Adrian Murtaugh, was arrested after her funeral. He led police to Camm’s arms and legs, which he’d bagged and tossed beneath the Interstate 275 bridge in Wilder.

The crime has been dubbed the “Torso Nurse” case, and repeatedly identified as one of the most sensational in Campbell County. Murtaugh was convicted in November 1977 and sentenced to life in prison.

Murderer up for parole

But as Hetteberg says, “Life doesn’t always mean life.”

This month, the Kentucky Department of Corrections parole board will have two hearings at the state reformatory at LaGrange in Oldham County: One to hear the case for Murtaugh’s relase, and one for his dead wife’s family to explain why that should never happen.

Murtaugh denied a request for an interview for this story. Now gray and 61 years old, he will be eligible for parole on Dec. 1.

Spokeswoman Lisa Lamb said all prisoners receive a risk-and-needs assessment that’s used to identify risk to reoffend and needs of the offender to create a case management plan. The Kentucky Department of Corrections offender site gave Murtaugh a risk assessment rating of “very low.”

The idea that Murtaugh could get out of prison is preposterous to Cary Camm, who was just 15 when her sister went missing.

Who is Kevin Murtaugh?

Murtaugh is an Irish immigrant who came to America as a four-year-old orphan. He’d been a busboy at the Beverly Hills Supper Club as a young adult and met Diane Camm through a mutual friend.

She, along with her sister and two of her brothers, were adopted, so the two connected, her family said.

They married May 22, 1976, just a few months after they met. She wore a yellow gown. They posed together, smiling, for pictures.

But it wasn’t long before they started having spats, separating and getting back together. Just before Diane was killed, Cary Camm said, her sister had decided to end her relationship with Murtaugh.

Encountering Murtaugh, his crime

Hetteberg, who was a prosecutor’s detective, Kentucky State Police and the Hamilton County coroner’s office investigated the case.

Murtaugh told them he’d found his wife dead of a drug overdose in his apartment, court records show. He wanted to “spare her family the embarrassing awareness of her use of drugs” so he decided to make her death look like a murder.

He put a rope around her neck. Borrowed a chainsaw. Put the body in a bathtub. He cut up the body, and took its pieces, bundled, out of his place.

But the autopsy showed Camm suffered bruising from being strangled. That can’t happen after death, the coroner stated.

Additionally, evidence showed Diane Camm had alcohol and a depressant in her system at the time of her death. And, said Hetteberg, “The CSI was able to match the blades to (the cuts in) the bone in Diane’s torso. Bone matter and hair was found in the trap of the bathtub in his apartment.”

But the real key to his conviction was Murtaugh’s own words, offered while under investigation. Court records show that Murtaugh signed a written statement detailing the circumstances of his wife’s death and dismemberment and then voluntarily videotaped the same statement.

“He viewed himself as intelligent,” Hetteberg recalled. “He had aspirations of being a writer – and he wrote out a confession.”

At trial, the defense continued to contend that Murtaugh’s wife died of an overdose and that he was a latent schizophrenic, triggered into the dismemberment after finding her dead.

The jury didn’t buy it, and Murtaugh has been in prison ever since.

Little sister’s fight

When parole dates near, Cary Camm tries to soothe herself with memories of growing up near Diane.

“I remember her quirky smiles,” she said. “I could crawl up to her in bed and talk to her.”

When her sister went missing, the family assumed Diane had gone to Florida to be with the kids’ dad, William Camm. Their parents were divorced and she’d done that before. But one day shortly after Diane disappeared, Cary Camm knew something was amiss.

“I’d come home from school,” she recalled. “Mom said I wasn’t going to watch TV.” Later she heard voices at the door.

“I saw my uncle. I said, ‘Hi, Doc,’ ” Camm recalled. Fred Stine was a Campbell County coroner and her uncle. She saw two officers and would soon learn that one was Hetteberg. They said the torso found in A.J. Jolly Park was Diane’s.

Since her sister’s death, Cary Camm has dealt with depression and anxiety and tried suicide three times, she said. She has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

She is discreet about where she lives in Northern Kentucky. Despite that, in 2002 she received a letter from Murtaugh, who apologized to her for all he’d put the family through.

Cary Camm recently glanced at the letter with disdain.

“This is a ploy of saying, ‘I’ve done this step,’ ” she concludes.

So she attends every parole hearing – five before this one – since Murtaugh’s conviction almost 38 years ago.

And as outrageous as it is to her that Murtaugh could ever be let out of prison, Camm is scared, because it’s reality. She worries for her family, and for the community, about what might happen if Kevin Murtaugh gets out.

Flatly, she says, “I don’t trust what Kevin can do."

‘Torso Nurse’ killer up for parole

• Kevin A. Murtaugh, convicted of murder, Nov. 22, 1977.

• Victim hearing Oct. 19 (Monday); Murtaugh’s hearing Oct. 20 (Wednesday); parole eligibility Dec. 1.

• Letters to: The Kentucky Parole Board, P.O. Box 2400, Frankfort, Ky. 40602-2400. Include inmate’s name and ID: #078457

Source: Kentucky Department of Corrections