Child Serial Killer Joseph Kondro Victim’s Family Says There’s ‘No Justice’ Decades Later: ‘It’s Horrific’

The suffering that serial killer Joseph Kondro inflicted on the loved ones of his young victims continues to ripple through generations 30 years later.  

“It is a hefty scar on our family that will live forever,” Melissa Noonan tells A&E Crime + Investigation. 

Noonan’s niece, Kara Rudd, was one of Kondro’s rape and murder victims. She disappeared from Monticello Middle School in Longview, Wash., on November 21, 1996.  

But she wasn’t his first prey.  

Kondro targeted at least two of his close friends’ children and was suspected of being responsible for the rapes and murders of even more. 

Nevertheless, his reign of terror on the Pacific Northwest logging town ended when Kara’s body was found six weeks later, and his DNA was recovered from the 12-year-old’s remains. 

Her violent death left the family eternally shattered, and the paranoia continues to follow them to this day. 

“I’m always looking over my shoulder, scared to death,” Noonan admits. “There's no shock as to what humans can do to each other. It's horrific, and I’m pretty sure all our girls [in the family] have ended up traumatized due to that [Kara’s murder], no matter their age.” 

The self-described sociopath was known lovingly as “Uncle Joe” to his friends’ kids.  

“Everybody seemed to really like him,” Kara’s cousin, Diana Allen, recounts to A&E Crime + Investigation. “He was around a lot of children in our family.” 

Kondro, a father of six and millworker who would later be dubbed the “Longview Serial Killer,” was a regular at her family’s gatherings and even attended Allen’s 16th birthday party on May 21, 1995.  

“I remember the smile on his face. And then to turn around and find out what happened to Kara...” Allen’s voice trails.  

Kara was a breath of fresh air to those who knew the 12-year-old. 

“She was like the sunshine that lit up a gloomy sky,” Noonan says.  

Like many children in their family, Kara was familiar with Kondro.  

He once lived in her family’s garage until a dispute in the summer of 1996 forced her mother, Janet LaPray, to evict him.  

Months later, a week before Thanksgiving, LaPray waited at the school bus stop for her daughter to come home, but she never showed up.  

Another one of Kara's cousins informed her aunt that Kondro picked her up from school earlier that day.  

“We immediately knew it was bad,” Allen remembers. 

LaPray told police that Kondro took her daughter and that she believed he killed her. 

Six weeks later, a tip led authorities to search Mount Solo in Longview.  

Down a ravine, beneath the shell of an abandoned Volkswagen Beetle, was Kara’s body: the top half decayed, but the bottom half seemingly preserved.  

Forensic experts extracted sperm from a rectal swab, and the DNA tied Kondro to the girl’s death.  

He later admitted to police that he took Kara to an abandoned house where he raped and strangled her to death. 

“She was just an amazing child, well above her years,” Noonan recalls, gushing over how her niece would dote over her baby girl. “The minute I'd walk into the house, Kara would come right up and steal my little baby from me, and I wouldn't see her again until it was time for me to leave. And whatever outfit I had put my daughter in that day surely was not the same outfit that I would get her back in.” 

In February 1999, in an attempt to dodge the death penalty, the defense offered prosecutors a deal: Kondro would confess and provide specifics about the 1985 cold case of 8-year-old Rima Traxler, in exchange for his life.  

Both sides agreed, and Kondro shared the grisly details of Rima’s vicious death.  

On May 15, 1985, he claimed he saw the young girl walking home from St. Helens Elementary School when he coaxed her to get in his truck. 

The little girl recognized her stepdad Rusty Traxler’s close friend.  

Rima’s mom, Danelle Kinne, and stepdad warned her never to go anywhere with anyone, unless that person knew the family password: “unicorn.” 

“I said, ‘Hi, I’m here to pick you up. The password is ‘unicorn.’ Get in,’” Kondro told detectives in his 1999 confession, as heard in season 2 of A&E’s Cold Case Files. “She gets in my truck—bang—closes the door.” 

He told Rima that they were going to meet her parents for a swim at Germany Creek in Longview.  

“Which was a complete lie,” Kondro admitted. “It was just a ploy to get her to take her clothes off, so I wouldn't have to take them off later. At that time, I intended to kill her.” 

Kondro said he struck Rima unconscious, choked her and bashed her skull with a rock.  

He then hid her dead body behind a log.  

While confessing the details to detectives, he likened his ravenous thirst to rape and kill kids to that of an alligator. 

“They eat, and then they sink to the bottom of the river and digest their food for weeks, and then they're ready to do it again,” Kondro said. “That's how I am. I could wait another 10 years, and I'd always want to do it again.”

Despite providing a location for Rima’s remains, authorities failed to recover her body. 

As part of the deal, Kondro was sentenced to 55 years in prison for the kidnappings, sexual assaults and murders of Kara and Rima.  

He was questioned about at least 70 other disappearances and murders in the area but never convicted. 

In an interview one year before his death, Kondro revealed he had been a child predator all his life. 

"I'm a sociopath, psychopath. I've done a lot of weird things," he said. "I can remember [as] a little kid being sexually deviant with kids in the neighborhood. And it never stopped. My victims never got older. I've been a serial child rapist ever since I was a child myself." 

Kondro died of natural causes in 2012 at the Washington State Penitentiary. He was 52.  

“There will never be justice for this family. No way,” Noonan says. “He took an important link in our family that's gone and can never be replaced.”