By NC Wanted Staff

Posted: Oct 17, 2008
Updated: Oct. 15, 2009

FORSYTH COUNTY — Jordan Kennedy has three memories of her mother. One involves an angry duck at a petting zoo and Kathi wiping tears away; another involves Kathi and her brother trying to kill a snake with a garden hoe. The third, and final, of Jordan’s memories is of Kathi’s dead body, lying on the living room floor.

Saturday marks 15 years since Jordan, then 4 years old, wandered into the living room with an empty water glass, hoping her mom would fill it up. Not long before that, Kathi had been strangled, beaten and stabbed, and in the time since, her killer has walked around free.

The murder was brutal, said Lt. Tim Leonard of the Kernersville Police Department, and any of the three methods of her killer’s attack would have been fatal. Lt. Leonard keeps Kathi’s file, a thick binder of interviews and evidence, close to his desk, and dreams of the day he makes an arrest.

Now Jordan is a freshman at NC State hoping to become a veterinarian, and the idea of her mother’s killer walking around free, going about his life, makes her angry.

“I don’t understand why someone would want to do that to a person that’s always good, who’s never really upset anyone, who had two children, with a husband, about to move into a new house to start a new life,” Jordan said. “They took that all away from us. .I would feel more content if that person wasn’t out there living their life normally while we have to suffer for their actions.”

Kathi Goff married David Kennedy in June of 1985, and within a few years, wanted children more than anything. She tried hard to get pregnant, and Kathi’s sister, Diane Woolard, remembers her sister visiting her work with a positive pregnancy test, ecstatic her prayers had been answered.

“She was just on top of the world,” Diane said. “She was going to finally be a mother, but because of what happened to her – whoever killed her took that away from her, and took that away from her children.”

By October 1994, Jordan was 4 and Taylor was 11 months old, and the couple was living in an apartment in Kernersville with plans to build a house. On October 17, David took a long weekend fishing trip and Kathi stayed home with the girls. She put them to bed and some time later, someone came to the home and murdered her. There was nothing missing from the house and there was no forced entry, leaving investigators and family with the feeling that Kathi knew her killer.

Kathi’s mother became concerned the next day. When she went to the apartment after Kathi wouldn’t answer the phone, Jordan answered the door.

Now Jordan carries with her a lonely sadness at her mother’s absence, a deep faith in God and an angry regret that her younger sister doesn’t have the memories she does. And Diane laments her sister was deprived of dance recitals, high school graduations and hopefully someday, weddings.

“Those times with her children that some people might take for granted – that’s what she lived for,” Diane said. “So it really is a shame. It’s been a cruel shame that she was killed, and couldn’t enjoy those things with her children.”

Jordan approaches the anniversary of her mother’s death with both anger and a sometimes conflicting desire that people remember what happened. In the 14 years since her last memory of her mother, much has grown in her – a strong sense of self, doubts it will ever be solved, and forgiveness for the man who did this. Still, her sense of the wrongness of what happened has far from diminished.

”This date shouldn’t even be important to us. It shouldn’t have even happened but it did,” Jordan said. “Everyone needs to remember what a terrible person this person was for doing that. And that it’s not OK for him to still be out there living his life.”

If you have any information about the unsolved murder of Kathi Goff Kennedy, call NC WANTED toll free at 1.866.43.WANTED (1.866.439.2683) or click on "Report a Tip" Your identity can be kept confidential.