HUNTSVILLE — K’Lynn Kohr should be cutting loose this weekend, taking a break from her first classes as an art major. This would have been her first Labor Day weekend as a college student.

Instead, she’s been gone for a year now, murdered, leaving many still asking why.

Later this fall, they could get some answers.



The crime

On Labor Day afternoon 2010, a Huntsville teen discovered the body of his girlfriend, a 17-year-old Huntsville High School senior, in the home she shared with her cousin in the Tanglewood mobile home subdivision.

Neighbors summoned police to the residence in the 500 block of Nan Way at 2:40 p.m. Monday, Sept. 6, 2010. When they arrived, police found Kohr stabbed to death with wounds to her arms and chest. The shocking sight brought some of the officers to tears, neighbors told KBTX TV in Bryan-College Station.

“I don’t see why anyone would want to do that,” neighbor Mary Williams told the TV station the day after the teenager’s body was found, “because I’m telling you this was a very nice girl.”



The victim

K’Lynn Sherrie Kohr was born Jan. 11, 1993, in San Diego, Calif., to Paul and Julie Kohr. She had moved to Huntsville from Madisonville two years before her murder following the death of her mother, a running coach, according to published reports. Kohr’s neighbors, friends, family and teachers described her as “a good girl,” who was kind and artistic, a good friend, a lover of horses and the color purple.

“K’Lynn loved animals, art, family and friends. She was looking forward to her senior year at Huntsville High School and then pursuing an art degree,” said her obituary, published Sept. 11, 2010, in The Huntsville Item. Funeral services for her in Huntsville attracted students, teachers, friends and family. Teachers remembered Kohr as “a happy part of my day,” a young woman “who could light up a room with (her) smile.”

After an autopsy in Dallas, Kohr’s remains were cremated and, with no burial site to visit, those who continue to mourn her find other ways to express their love and grief, they told The Item.

Among them is her cousin, Rebekah Crowell, who spent the Sunday night before Labor Day, 2010, away from home in Conroe. Crowell said she never knew when she said goodbye to her cousin that those would be the last words she would have a chance to say.

“A struggle I’ve had to have with myself in these past months is the fact that I should have been there,” Crowell said. “It was our house. She shouldn’t have been alone. Why didn’t I make her come back to Conroe with me?”

Crowell was scheduled to be at work at 2 p.m., but called in to stay in Conroe. She said she asks herself if being home would have made any difference.

“Would anything have happened? Could we have fought him off together?,” she said. “The hardest part is not knowing why or if things could’ve ended differently ... or at all.”

Losing her friend and family member has been the hardest thing Crowell has ever endured, she said, and she cries herself to sleep more often than not.

“The only thing scary is knowing that even though you might think you’re safe at any given moment and feel comfortable, really you have no idea who’s going to walk onto your front porch,” she said. “Definitely makes you think twice about being home alone with unlocked doors. I’ve had many dreams about her just walking in the house like it was all a hoax — though it wouldn’t be entertaining, even a little — I would much rather that have been the case.”



The accused

Huntsville police quickly identified a suspect and launched a manhunt for a 27-year-old recent Texas prison parolee, Jerwoody “Jared” Moler, a native of Pampa, Texas.

Moler had moved into a Christian-based halfway house in New Waverly after being paroled in June 2010 from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Ferguson Unit in Midway. The halfway house director, Gary Zackery, also employed Moler at his business, Lysander Wholesale Electrical Supplies on Old Houston Road in Huntsville, The Item reported at the time.

After being accused of several halfway house rule infractions, Moler was asked to leave. He rented his own place at 610 Hayman Street, in walking distance of his employer — and a little more than a mile from K’Lynn Kohr’s newly occupied mobile home.

Before the murder, Moler was having trouble at work, hitting up co-workers for money, stealing from one and even assaulting him. But after he was kicked out of the halfway house, Zackery told The Item, Moler seemed to turn over a new leaf.

“He’s been good ever since then. It was like he woke up, and I was really happy that change came about,” Zackery said days after Kohr’s murder. “But it was all on the outside. He’s been leading a double life, and I don’t know when that started, but it certainly has been for the last two weeks.”

Now Moler was in the wind. He had left Huntsville in his employer’s 2002 tan Ford Explorer. Police, with the help of the Texas Rangers, tracked him to a Dallas pawn shop, where he attempted to sell stolen lawn furniture. Watching video surveillance from the pawn shop, police noted a bandage on Moler’s right hand.   

Teams of law enforcement continued to track their suspect until, on Friday, Sept. 9, 2010, Iowa State Police captured him at gunpoint at a store in West Des Moines, Iowa.  He was extradited back to Huntsville, where he has been held at the Walker County Jail on more than $1 million in bonds for almost a year. Moler, with previous convictions for escape and assault on a public servant, has reportedly not been a model prisoner. Walker County sheriff’s deputies have thwarted several escape attempts, they said.



The charges

Moler is charged with first-degree murder, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and credit card abuse. Why not capital murder? A capital charge depends on evidence of “an underlying offense” such as kidnapping or sexual assault, Walker County District Attorney David Weeks told The Item last year.

Over the course of the investigation, police have declined to describe the evidence in the case or the details of Kohr’s last minutes. Weeks disclosed at an August pre-trial hearing that police found blood in Moler’s home as well as knives and a pair of rubber gloves. Moler is set for another pre-trial hearing Oct. 7 with a tentative trial date of Oct. 31.

“The hardest part about this entire tragedy is trying to understand it, knowing you never will, and having to force yourself to get used to missing a piece of your life,” Crowell said. “He didn’t just take her life away, he took a little piece of all of us who ever loved K’Lynn. Accepting her death is one thing, accepting the horrors she went through in her last moments is another thing all together and there will never, ever be any reason in the world to explain why.”

Nervous but ready, Crowell said she is prepared to hear the details of the case and see the man accused of killing her cousin.

“You’re seeing the person up close and face-to-face for the first time, that took the life of your family member,” she said. “It’s heart wrenching, painful and most of all maddening. It’s in anticipation of all those emotions you expect to feel that makes me nervous.”



Moler’s family

When retaining the services of a court-appointed attorney, Moler testified that he had no family and no means of hiring a private attorney.

Kavori Maddox said she has no money, but she does consider Moler a part of her family. Hearing that he denounced any family “hurts (her) feelings,” she said. Maddox’s family took over the care of Moler, a child they called “Jared,” after his mother died.

“His mom and my grandma were best friends and my grandma took care of him,” Maddox said. “He was family to us.”

Maddox, about five years younger than Moler, said she looked up to him and considered him a big brother. While Moler was incarcerated in TDCJ, Maddox said, she wrote him regularly, only stopping when her grandmother died in July 2009 because she was unsure how to break the news to him.

“He was talking about getting out and coming to see me,” she said. “I was happy I was going to get to see him. (Kohr) was real close to my age. I’m glad he didn’t.”

In the days after Kohr’s murder, Maddox said, Texas Rangers visited her home to ask if she had any information on his whereabouts.

“The day after they found her body, they came up to me. I didn’t even know he’d been released,” she said. “They started telling me everything. I started to get scared. It shocked me. When I found out, it really freaked me out.”

Moler’s brushes with the law didn’t start until after he left Pampa, according to Maddox. While growing up, he was a fun person to be around and a good friend, she said.

“We always hung out. I always rode around with him and stuff,” she said. “When I was hanging around him, he was fun to be around. We’d walk to the park, jam to music and ride around town. I liked being around him. I’ve heard a lot of bad stuff about him, but he’s never seemed crazy to me.”

In the same breath, Maddox said she can’t believe Moler could be capable of murder, and yet, there’s something there.

“I don’t know that side of him,” she said. “Well, I kind of do — I’ve seen him get angry. I never would think he would kill somebody. I wish I could talk to him and ask him why.”



Hurting and healing

Crowell said these past 12 months have been a journey of loss, terror and hopefully — finally — peace.

“I guess the first step to moving on is having to face reality, and the reality is you are still alive,” she said. “As much as that hurts in itself — the thought that you still get to keep living when she doesn’t — you have to realize you aren’t alone and although she’s gone, you have to keep living. There are others who need you just as much as you needed her.”