HOUSTON – Three people were murdered inside a specialty automotive shop in League City in Nov. 1983. Prosecutors and investigators were shocked by the level of brutality.

“It was just savagery and rage that was going on in that short time period inside that shop,” said Galveston County prosecutor Kevin Petroff.

While it would take 40 years for the case to finally be solved, the killer never left the Houston area.

Corvette Concepts

On the morning of Nov. 3, 1983, a co-owner of the League City automotive shop Corvette Concepts arrived at work to find his business partner, her boyfriend and an electrician murdered inside the business.

“It was a lot of rage, a lot of anger, a lot of fury,” said retired FBI agent Richard Rennison. “Knowing how many shots were fired and the type of pistol that was used, there had to be at least one reload, if not two. It was very violent.”

Rennison said the shop’s co-owner, Beth Wilburn, and her boyfriend, Tommy McGraw were both shot and stabbed multiple times with a screwdriver. An electrician, James Oatis, was also shot. The murders occurred on Nov.2, but the bodies weren’t discovered until Nov. 3 when Wilburn’s business partner, Bob Currie, opened the business.

“Beth Wilburn, who by all appearances, was the primary victim and most likely the only intended victim. She was found in one of the two offices in the front part of the of the shop, and the shop had an office area, customer waiting area, and then five bays where the cars would be worked on,” said Rennison. “Beth was stabbed approximately 114 times and shot four times in the back of the head, and the medical examiner determined the shots were postmortem.”

Rennison said McGraw was stabbed 14 times with the same screwdriver used to stab Wilburn and then shot at least 6 times. His body was found in a bay closest to the customer service area.

“We know Beth was stabbed first because the object that was used to stab her was lodged in Tommy’s back, and it had blood from both Tommy and Beth on it,” said Rennison.

Oatis was not an employee of the shop, but had been hired to hang lights in the shop area of the business. Rennison said Oatis wasn’t even supposed to be in the shop the night of the murders. Rennison said he was scheduled to do the work the night before, had to cancel because he didn’t have enough gas in his truck to make the trip to League City at the time.

“(Oatis) was found at the opposite end of the bays where he was on a ladder working, and he was on the ground, and his leg was still hung up in chains from where he was hanging the chain so they could hang the lights,” said Rennison. “(He) was shot ten times, but one was just a graze. So there was nine direct hits, and he was not stabbed at all.”

Oatis left behind a wife and three daughters, one of whom was born shortly after his murder.

The Initial Investigation

Rennison said the initial investigators assigned to the case focused on Currie, because he was Wilbrun’s partner and because the two had a previous dating relationship.

“So that’s kind of a person that you should look at, and they did. The failing, I think, was that they looked at (him) to the exclusion of all other suspects or witnesses,” said Petroff. “We’re looking at just years of time in which no other suspect was looked at, developed, and they had tunnel vision that was just focused on Bob Currie.”

Chief of the felony division for the Galveston County District Attorney’s Office, Kayla Allen said two years after the murders an employee of the shop at the time, Jesse Dean Kersh, was brought in for questioning by League City police. Kersh, who went by Dean, admitted to being the last person in the shop before the murders were committed, but denied knowing about what happened or even owning a gun.

“What you want to look at a murder scene is who is the last person to be there?” said Rennison. “By Dean’s own admission, he was the last person to be there.”

Allen said the detective who questioned Kersh didn’t stay on the case for very long before being reassigned.

“I think he only had it about maybe a year, and so, he didn’t get to develop as much as he probably could have,” said Allen.

A Fresh Set of Eyes

The investigation into the murders remained cold until 2006.

“I was I was with League City (police) from 1993 to 2003,” said Rennison. “Shortly before I went to the FBI, I was assigned the case at League City, but it was just a few months before I left so I didn’t really have time to do a lot of investigation into it. But I did have time to kind of familiarize myself with the investigation.”

Rennison came back to the area as an FBI agent in 2006, and at the request of League City, began taking another look at the investigation.

“We found a person who had not been interviewed in the in the original investigation, and this person was a former roommate of Dean and they were good friends in high school,” said Rennison. “If he was roommates with Dean then he needs to be interviewed, and it just slipped through the cracks of the original investigation.”

Rennison said Darryl Krogman told investigators he saw Kersh buy a .22 caliber pistol at a gun show months before the murders. Krogman said Kersh also asked him for help in fitting the gun with a silencer. Krogman said the first silencer they made didn’t work, but during a second attempt he was able to weld a different silencer on the gun Kersh bought.

Rennison said Krogman still had the first silencer buried in his garage and handed it over to investigators.

“This is a guy who’s known (Kersh) since high school. They were friends in high school, remained friends after the murder. They moved in together, they lived together a couple years, they were still friends, they never had a falling out,” said Allen. “They never disliked each other. They just kind of moved off and grew apart, so (Krogman) didn’t have any motive to make any of this up.”

Krogman’s information became even more vital to the investigation after test results were conducted at the FBI lab in Quantico, Va. on bullet slugs pulled from the victims. Rennison said the hairs on the back of his neck stood-up when he got a call from the FBI firearms examiner.

“He said, ‘the bullets that they took out of the bodies had an anomaly on them.’ He said, ‘they came into contact with something after they left the barrel, before they entered the victims,’” said Rennison. “‘This is what we see with homemade silencers.’”

Rennison said this is the only case in his career that involved a silencer used during a murder.

“There’s not a lot of James Bond type murders out there, so silencers are very rare,” said Rennison. “Without the silencer, all we have is a guy saying he bought a 22 caliber pistol at one point.”

However, Rennison said that information wasn’t nearly enough to get charges on Kersh because the murder weapon and attached silencer was never found. Rennison said another clue came from fingernail scrapings taken from Wilburn in 1983. Now in his capacity as an FBI agent, and with advances in DNA testing, Rennison sent the scrapings off to the FBI lab. Rennison said the results were not even close to a definitive match, but could not exclude Kersh as a suspect. He said those same results, however, could exclude Currie as a suspect.

“Bob (Currie) voluntarily gave us his DNA sample and compared to what was found in the fingernails you can definitively say it couldn’t be him because he did not have that marker. So the killer had to have that marker; Dean (Kersh) had that marker, but one in three or one in five white males also did,” said Rennison. “Not even close to something to hang your hat on, but another piece of the puzzle.”

Timeline, Motive and decades of leads

Investigators initially believed the murders happened sometime between 7:30pm and 10pm. Petroff said this came from two men who worked at the shop telling investigators they left while Wilburn, Kersh and Oatis were still there, and when a police officer checked the property after seeing a fence was left open. Allen said that officer didn’t investigate further since all the lights to the business were off and nothing else seemed suspicious.

Allen said they also confirmed Wilburn stayed late because Currie had a date and McGraw was coming to pick her up after work. Allen said they also learned Wilburn received a call at 7:30pm from an angry customer who was complaining about shoddy work performed by Kersh on their corvette.

“When you look at the history of Corvette Concepts, when they first decided to open it, they didn’t have a lot of money, and so they had friends helping do things and build things. One of them was Jesse Dean Kersh, who was building the offices out, and they weren’t really paying him to do that. So his thought was that he would kind of be rewarded by working there and making money there, but he wasn’t a good mechanic and so he wasn’t making the money that he thought that he should make,” said Allen. “He would put brake pads on backwards and stuff like that, and they pick up cars and they’d still have the same issue with it. So it just wasn’t a good relationship.”

Allen said the problems with Kersh’s work were an on-going source of tension in the shop. The night of the murders Wilburn received a call from a couple who brought their Corvette in because it was overheating. Kersh performed the repairs, but by the time the couple got the car home, it was still overheating and they were now having problems with the speedometer. Rennison said it appears Wilburn called Kersh into the office to chastise him for the poor work and years of frustration over his performance finally came to a head.

Rennison and Allen said Wilburn was a successful business person with a direct, and sometimes abrasive, demeanor.

“Everybody’s got a breaking point, fortunately 99.9% of us don’t make it to that point, but apparently Dean (Kersh) hit a threshold,” said Rennison. “An easy speculation is to say that (Wilburn) fired him and he didn’t want to be fired.”

Allen said further evidence points to the murders being a crime of passion, including that no cash, jewelry or tools were stolen and to turn the lights off to the business required a specific knowledge of the building because the switches were hidden behind a large Coke machine. She said the screwdriver was also a “instrument of opportunity.”

“This doesn’t appear to be a calculated; ‘I’m going to come to work today and kill somebody.’ It was definitely he snapped and was full of rage,’” said Rennison.

However, Petroff said if charges were to be filed against Kersh they would have to exhaust every lead that had accumulated since 1983. A task force comprised of the DA’s Office, Rennison and League City was formed to look at every lead and tip generated in the case.

“The thing with cold cases is they come to you in different forms and this one came with 40 years of investigative leads and statements. You know, people have heard this or that on the street,” said Petroff. “The fear was we had boxes of evidence, 40 years of just random tips; other suspects, there were allegations of maybe these murders were drug related, maybe it was a cartel hit, maybe it was some other love triangle that wasn’t really clear from the evidence. And so two detectives, Cory Beyer and Gina Vogel with League City, took on the Herculean task of running down every one of those leads.”

Once every lead was exhausted, murder charges were filed against Kersh in Feb. 2016.

“We found a lot of red herrings throughout the case and ran each one completely to ground,” said Rennison.

Two Alibis and a Watch

Rennison said Currie told investigators he left the shop around 7pm with his brother, went home took a nap and then planned to meet a woman in Houston he had met the weekend before. Rennison said Currie was excited about the date so he went to the mall to buy new clothes and was able to provide receipts for those purchases. Rennison said Currie then went with a friend to a nightclub in Houston to meet the woman and stayed there until midnight. Rennison said this timeline was supported by multiple people who saw Currie that night.

“I interviewed Bob, I certainly didn’t get the impression that he was a killer,” said Rennison.

Rennison said Kersh’s alibi was far less specific and couldn’t specifically account for why it took him more than an hour to arrive at his house even though it was only 3 miles away from the shop.

“What we had from those interviews is two different versions of events from both Bob Currie and Jesse Dean Kersh. Bob Currie was able to explain when he left, where he went, he went shopping at the mall. He had a receipt from some of the goods that he bought. He then went to a friend’s house who confirmed all this. And then they went to Houston to a bar to meet another couple and he was there until midnight,” said Petroff. “Jesse Dean Kersh had a very different story in which he left (the shop), he says leaving Beth alive, which we didn’t believe, but that he left there and then sort of drove around a bit and eventually went home.”

Kersh’s lack of a specific alibi came into sharper focus after he was arrested and investigators met with Oatis’ widow. Rennison said she let them know she had her late husband’s watch, the one he was wearing when he was murdered. Rennison said when he picked up the watch he was stunned to see it had stopped at 8:04 on the 2nd.

“It backed up what all the other information that we had to to make the timeline,” said Rennison. “It was basically confirmation that, hey, we got the timeline, right.”

Rennison said it appears when Oatis was shot and fell from his ladder the watch hit the concrete and stopped. He said the watch, along with the two mechanics saying when they left the shop Kersh, Wilburn and Oatis were still there, Currie leaving the shop around 7pm and then the 7:30pm complaint phone call about Kersh’s work further narrowed the timeline.

“The only plausible solution here is the last guy there committed the murders,” said Rennison.

The Trial

In May 2023, Kersh went on trial for three counts of murder.

“We had to really confront certain things. One was that for years after the murder, there was a lead suspect that was not the person charged, and so we had to talk about tunnel vision. We had to contrast, which was some pretty poor police work early on, with the excellent police work at the end of this that led to these charges,” said Petroff.

Kersh maintained his innocence and testified in his own defense.

“We didn’t expect him to confess at the end of the cross-examination, but made it clear that even he couldn’t confront the physical evidence we had,” said Petroff.

Allen said there were also discrepancies in the statement he gave investigators in 1985 and the statement he gave during trial. Allen said Kersh said he knew about the complaint call to Wilburn, but not because he overheard the call but because the car’s owner told him the next day. Allen said the owner of the vehicle, Donald Myers, testified during the trial and contradicted Kersh’s account.

“When (Myer’s) wife did speak to Beth that day or that evening, she told him to bring (the car) back first thing in the morning. So when he drove up the cops were already there. It was already cordoned off and had the tape and everything, and he didn’t speak to anyone. He drove up and then saw what was happening and drove off,” said Allen. “Jesse Dean Kersh made it sound like Mr. Myers went across the street, which is where everybody was kind of staged while everything was going on, they had to be away from the crime scene, and that Mr. Myers would have went over there and told them, ‘well, my wife said not only does this not work, but my wife called last night around this time and was upset about this and, you know, the speedometer.’ And that just didn’t happen. It didn’t even make sense.”

Rennison admits he was also nervous about a jury understanding how someone with no history of violence could commit such an act of brutality and then never commit another act of violence again.

“I researched that and it’s not that uncommon,” said Rennison. “There’s a big difference between a rage killer and a serial killer. A serial killer, they want to go kill somebody. That’s what they are hoping to do. I don’t think Dean Kersh woke up that morning saying, ‘I’m going to kill Beth today.’ He probably didn’t think that ten minutes before he killed her, he probably wasn’t thinking that, he just snapped.”

Kersh was convicted on three counts of murder and given three life sentences.

“When I became a police officer I’d always heard about that case, and I was enamored with it, and I always wanted to work on it,” said Rennison. “And then I was fortunate enough to get to work on it and then fortunate enough to work on it from the federal side with a lot more resources, and then to actually find the evidence that we needed to find the right person and arrest him, very satisfied.”

Petroff and Allen said in addition to giving three families justice, they also lifted the cloud of suspicion hovering over Currie’s head most of his life.

“Giving him that peace of mind that 12 people knew that it wasn’t him, that it was Jesse Dean Kersh,” said Allen.