When officers reached the scene, after a neighbor heard a commotion and called 911, Kaim was still alive. “That’s where the police found him,” she said. As Kitchen unlatched a tall security gate, which the family had installed in the wake of the murder, she gestured toward the front entrance. I met Kitchen there, in August, when she was visiting one of her two older sisters, Ellen Benninghoven, who moved back into the home a few years after their mother’s death, in 2011. The Tanglewood home, where Kitchen grew up, is a mid-century-modern structure made of brick and glass. “All I could think about was how senseless it was for a person to throw away their life for a wallet,” Kitchen, who was forty at the time, wrote later, in her journal. On April 20, 1992, White was sentenced to life in prison. The jury reached a guilty verdict in forty-five minutes. At White’s trial, Kitchen noticed his small stature, and the mothers of his children sitting on his side of the courtroom, crying. White told investigators that he’d had an accomplice, a Jamaican friend who went by the street name Blocker, but the police never found or even identified him. Nine days later, police arrested a twenty-year-old Black man named Joseff Deon White in connection with the crime. On a summer night in 1991, Robert Hans Kaim, a seventy-seven-year-old white real-estate developer, had just pulled into his garage in Houston’s upscale Tanglewood neighborhood when an assailant robbed him at gunpoint, shot him in the chest, and then drove off with his wallet. Katie Kitchen had always felt some sadness about the fate of the man convicted of murdering her father.
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