Volume 4 · Chapter 2
Bloodthirsty Parolee
Tommy Ragan
Victim: Bruce Kim
Case at a glance
- When
- January 1977
- Where
- Centralia and Yelm, Washington
- Perpetrator
- Tommy Ragan
- Victim
- Bruce Kim
- Outcome
- Pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and admitted setting the apartment fire
The case
In January 1977, thirteen-year-old Bruce Kim went to a party at the Lemac Apartments, a run-down building in Centralia, Washington, and never came home. A few days later the building burned.
Investigators soon turned their attention to Tommy Ragan, a parolee whose record already included assault and kidnapping. A pair of blood-stained jeans connected him to the missing boy, and detectives went through his green 1960 Corvair looking for more. The breakthrough came from inside Ragan’s own family. His sister gave police information that led them to an old logging road near Yelm, where Bruce was found buried in a shallow grave.
Ragan pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and admitted that he had also set the fire at the Lemac Apartments. The case never drew much attention beyond western Washington, but it raised a question that runs through several stories in this volume: how a man with Ragan’s history came to be back on the street, and who was supposed to be watching him.
Read the full story
This case is told in full in True Crime Case Histories, Volume 4 by Jason Neal.
Get Volume 4 on AmazonCase photographs
2 photos
Where it happened
Why this case
“I grew up only a few blocks from where this happened, and that is the only reason I knew about it at all. It barely registered outside Washington. A thirteen-year-old boy deserved more than a few paragraphs in a local paper, so I wanted to give him a full chapter.”
— Jason Neal, author of True Crime Case Histories
