Logan Was Just a Baby When His Father Killed His Mother
(“Wired for Disaster,” Forensic Files)
Before tragedy struck, Kem Wenger was heading toward a more stable life. The Illinois hairdresser had become engaged to a student-minister who wanted to adopt her baby son, Logan, so she could distance herself from his unreliable father.
But the biological dad didn’t like that idea, so he planted a bomb in Kem’s house in Bloomington. Her fiancé, Kurt Simon, survived the blast, but it killed Kem, age 29.
Assorted siblings. For this week, I looked into how Logan — who was a toddler when his mother died and his father went to prison — survived this whole mess and what he’s doing today. I also searched for updates on Kem’s daughter as well as Kurt Simon.
So let’s get going on the recap of the 2006 Forensic Files episode “Wired for Disaster,” along with extra information from internet research.
Kemberly Sue Dohman came into the world on Sept. 25, 1963, in Bloomington, Illinois, the daughter of Wilma and Richard Dohman. She had three sisters and a brother, although it’s not clear how many of them arose from Wilma and Richard’s union — they split up.
Equipment maker. Only a couple bits of information about Kem’s early life turned up online. According to a 1976 Daily Leader story, Kem was a cheerleader in junior high and got to attend cheerleading camp. Her obituary mentions that she worked as an extra on Grandview, U.S.A., a movie shot in Pontiac, Illinois, circa 1983.
In 1985, Kem married a man whom Forensic Files calls Paul but other media accounts identify as Todd Wenger. They had a daughter, Kelsey, before divorcing.
Kem then started dating Dale Fosdick, a dark-haired furry-browed machinist who appropriately worked at Caterpillar. Dale would later admit that he backed away from Kem when she told him they were expecting a child.
New flame. Feeling alienated and worried, Kem considered terminating the pregnancy on two occasions but changed her mind both times, her friend Terry Hoffman said.
Once Logan was born, Dale contributed some of his income to support him, but it was insufficient and often late. In addition to her work as a hair stylist, the glamorous-looking Kem did housecleaning and babysitting to make extra money. Still, she needed to use food stamps.
While Logan was still a baby, Kem met Kurt Simon, a counselor studying to be a Presbyterian minister.
Goodwill tour. “Both of us were poor as church mice, but we were two of the happiest people,” Simon would later tell the Bloomington newspaper The Pantagraph.
As Forensic Files viewers will remember, Kurt sounded like good father material. Logan had already started calling him Daddy.
At around 10:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 22, 1993, Kem and Kurt returned to Kem’s house from a trip to Iowa, where Kurt lived and attended the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary. Friends had thrown the couple a surprise engagement shower at the Golden Congregational Church on the day before they headed back to Illinois.
Huge shakeup. The couple planned to attend Kelsey’s piano recital the next day.
Kurt entered the house first, taking in some luggage and then returning to the car to unload more items. “It’s a lot warmer here than it was in Iowa,” were the last words he heard Kem say before she went inside the residence.
Then, an explosion rocked the house and woke the neighbors. It was so powerful that shrapnel hit nearby houses.
Kurt found Kem lying on the floor dead. The blast had destroyed the right side of her skull.
Smoking guns. Investigators determined that in the hallway, Kem had used her left hand to pick up some type of package hiding a bomb, which detonated via a motion-activated switch.
Police found bomb-making components such as wires and fuses in the basement and battery wrappers and rubber gloves in a wastebasket upstairs.
Death and indignity. The evildoer apparently finished making the bomb on-site so it wouldn’t accidentally go off in transit (Mark Hofmann) and thought the explosion would destroy the entire house and leave no evidence.
Because the blast happened close to Kurt but left him unharmed, police at first considered him the chief suspect.
In front of the neighbors, officers placed Kurt in handcuffs, ordered him to sit on the ground, and hauled him in for questioning. They released him after a few hours, and he didn’t hold a grudge — they were just doing their jobs.
Insect activity? Kurt later spoke to The Pantagraph about his grief:
“It goes from uncontrollable sobbing to numbness to bouts of denial, bouts of anger. … It sounds cliché, but she was just a gem. She was one of the most soft-spoken, sensitive people. And she was gorgeous, but that was almost secondary.”
As far as a suspect, Kurt looked toward Kem’s mother, who by then was known by the name Cricket Lewis.
“If you take every kind of evil, roll it up into a ball, there you have Cricket Lewis,” Kurt said in one of Forensic Files‘ Top 10 best quotes.
Convenient passing. He deemed Cricket “terribly depraved” and capable of such a horrible act.
Kem’s friend Terry Hoffman seconded that motion.
“Cricket made her money on her back,” she said during her Forensic Files interview. “I mean, yes, she had a bar, but I think that the bar that she had was bought from the inheritance of an old lady that she took care of and that, of course, died under her care.”
Tax woes. Kurt noted that at Kem’s funeral, Cricket primarily mourned not her daughter but rather the loss of any insurance payout because Kem let her policy lapse.
(My research didn’t uncover any concrete evidence of wickedness attributable to Cricket, although apparently she was a bit of a tax cheat. In 1988, the Pantagraph noted that Illinois revoked her license because she failed to pay $1,545.95 in taxes and neglected to file returns for Cricket’s Tap, the bar she owned in Forrest, Illinois.)
Investigators considered Cricket a suspect in the homicide as well but ultimately concluded that neither she nor Kurt Simon had the mechanical wherewithal to create the pipe bomb that killed Kem.
Todd’s all right. Another suspect, Kem’s ex-husband, Todd, had reportedly had some custody disagreements over Kelsey. He worked at Mitsubishi Motor Manufacturing and lived just two miles away.
But Kurt Simon said that he and Kem got along with Todd, and Todd had a solid alibi anyway.
Next up on the suspect list came a former co-worker Kem had filed a sexual harassment complaint against. But he supplied proof that he hadn’t been anywhere near Bloomington in months.
Tinkerer. That left Logan’s father, Dale Fosdick, 31, who lived in an apartment on the east side of Bloomington.
Dale didn’t lack for technical skills. In addition to his work at Caterpillar, he constructed model airplanes and played with motors.
In Dale’s basement, law officers discovered a huge inventory of components used in explosives. Wire cutters from Dale’s residence made distinctive marks similar to those found on bomb fragments at Kem’s house. He had Walmart receipts for .25-caliber BBs like those used in the deadly device.
Jury divided. Officers arrested Dale Fosdick and charged him with first-degree murder.
Over the course of two trials — the first ended in a mistrial with one juror a holdout and another too ill to continue — the defense portrayed Dale as a devoted father incapable of violence.
Dale’s supporters asserted that he was too “wimpy” to murder anyone.
Hopping up. And he defended his performance as a parent. Dale admitted that he shrank back after he learned of Kem’s pregnancy but claimed he did a 180 later and embraced fatherhood.
Terry Hoffman acknowledged that Dale eventually decided he wanted to marry Kem.
And Dale had the homicide victim’s own mother on his side. Cricket portrayed Kurt Simon as the villain. She said that she and Kem had a good relationship until Kurt ruined it and robbed Kem of her joie de vivre.
Hit record. Cricket told the court about Dale’s impressive feats, like picking up Kem from the hospital after she gave birth and sticking around to watch her feed the infant.
(Cricket’s daughter Joni Bailey also supported Dale, but it’s not clear whether or not she testified.)
Defense lawyer Michael Costello tried to shame Kurt Simon, asking, “Why did you think you could take away someone else’s children? Think that was Christian?”
But the prosecution had plenty of ammunition on its side, too. McLean County State’s Attorney Charles Reynard pointed to Dale as a bitter malcontent who caused Kem’s life to be “vaporized in a violent, bloody explosion.”
Stingy dad. Reynard played a tape recording between Dale and Kem. She sarcastically said Dale wasn’t really dedicated to their son “until about the time I started dating Kurt — then the love started pouring out.”
Todd Wenger testified that Dale once told him he would rather quit his job than give Kem “a dime” in child support.
Dale’s former colleague Todd Grafelman said Dale worried that Kem would take their son and move to Iowa. (Actually, Kurt was reportedly planning to move into Kem’s house in Bloomington.)
Prosecutor pounces. It came out that Dale allegedly told associates that he was documenting Kem’s appointment books as evidence of fraud against the Department of Public Aid — and he was plotting to gain custody of Logan.
Reynard also remolded the testimony about Dale’s alleged meekness.
“How would a wimp kill someone?” Reynard asked. “Would he confront the person and do it face to face or would he do it coldly, sinister and secretive?”
Near the scene. Caterpillar colleague Harvey P “Sunny” Sturdevant — who had served in Vietnam — testified that Dale had asked him to kill Kem, although he didn’t take it seriously at the time. The two discussed bomb-making and the fact that BBs are hard to trace, according to Sturdevant.
Evidence showed that Dale mail-ordered hollow grenade material and waterproof fuses, although he claimed the fuses were for a Fourth of July celebration.
Neighbors testified to seeing Dale near Kem’s house within 12 hours of the explosion. Kem kept a spare key under the front steps and the backdoor screen had a hole in it, so Dale had easy points of access.
And Bloomington detective Dan Katz testified that Dale wasn’t always as responsible as Cricket alleged — Cricket had once admitted that she sometimes had to call Dale and yell in order to extract the child support he owed Kem.
Much contemplation. In the second trial, McLean County Circuit Judge William Caisley forbid the defense to use innuendo to cast suspicion upon Kurt Simon or Todd Wenger unless it had solid evidence.
After deliberating for 43 hours, a jury convicted Dale Fosdick of first-degree murder on February 26, 1996.
At the sentencing hearing, Cricket said that Dale, who had 25 supporters with him in court, could come live with her anytime. She held Dale’s hand and “tearfully kissed his cheek,” according to an AP account.
Epilogues. A single juror had voted against the death penalty, so Dale received 55 years.
“The rest of us have been sentenced to life without Kem,” Kurt Simon told The Pantagraph.
So, what happened to the principals in this drama?
Grandson is motivation. Cricket Lewis continued to advocate for Dale Fosdick. In May of 1996, she wrote a letter to the editor restating that Dale helped Kem financially. She complained that she had been “treated like a criminal because of my belief in Dale” and that Kurt Simon’s father — also a minister — “called me evil in front of the world on television.”
The grieving mother said that her “heart aches for Kem every day” and that the real killer was still out there.
Whether she really believed in Dale’s innocence is unclear — but she undoubtedly thought she’d have greater access to Logan with Dale, rather than Kurt, as his custodian.
Man of the cloth. Cricket died at the age of 65 on Dec. 19, 2003. Her obituary noted that she ran Cricket’s Tap from 1983 to 1988.
The would-be son-in-law Cricket so despised has done well for himself. Today, Kurt Simon who, except for some gray hair, looks pretty much the same as he did on Forensic Files, is a minister at First Presbyterian Church in Vandalia, Illinois. He has two “incredible daughters, Sadie Joe and Greta,” according to his bio for an article he wrote about meditation.
The children who Kem Wenger left behind have taken up careers in public service. After her mother’s death, Kelsey went to live with Todd Wenger and later became a case manager supervisor for the Salvation Army and has also worked in shelters for homeless people, according to her LinkedIn profile. (Todd died at the age of 52 on Nov. 27, 2003.)
Early exit. Kelsey’s brother goes by the name Logan Fosdick and appears to have a relationship with his sister despite that they grew up in separate households.
Beverly and Sylvester Fosdick, Dale’s parents, brought up Logan — Kurt Simon never had custody of him.
Meanwhile, Logan’s imprisoned father died of natural causes at the age of 48 in 2010. Dale Fosdick’s obituary noted he was a muscle car and aviation enthusiast, and asked that donations be made for Logan’s education.
Survivors club. Now 29, Logan graduated from Eureka College in 2014 and joined the Bloomington police force in 2016. A 2017 video shows him and another officer having fun singing a Christmas carol.
Logan is married and has a baby.
Incidentally, Logan Fosdick is in good company in the Forensic Files “family” — there are other episodes featuring children who attained stable lives despite having fathers convicted of killing their mothers.
You might enjoy reading about Noreen and Jack Boyle’s son, Collier Landry, or Tim Boczkowski’s three children (one of whom later changed his mind about his father’s innocence).
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
