Wedding Photo of Murdered Triad Mom Survives Fire

KERNERSVILLE, NC – It’s the only unsolved murder in Kernersville. Kathi Goff Kennedy; brutally beaten and stabbed to death in 1994, as her two children slept in another room.

Kathi, her husband David and their daughters, Taylor and Jordan, lived in an apartment in Kernersville’s Springbrook complex for three weeks. While David was on a fishing trip, Kathi looked after her two daughters, when someone knocked on her door in the evening of October 17^th, 1994.

“She was strangled and stabbed with a knife they found in our apartment,” explained Taylor, who was only 11 months old at the time.

Her older sister, Jordan, 3-years-old at the time, found her mother dead.

“She removed the knife from her hair and put it away so I wouldn’t get it,” said Taylor.

The next morning, their grandmother found them in the apartment. The suspect(s) in her murder, were never captured. Shortly after Kathi’s death, David moved his two girls to a house on Hedrick Drive.

Twenty-two years later, on New Year’s Eve of 2016, the house burned down. One of the only things untouched by the fire, a picture of Kathi in her wedding dress.

“When I pulled it out, it really just had some dust on it and some soot. So, we are going to have that professionally cleaned,” said Taylor, who found the picture next to her father’s bed in the closet. “You’re just worried that little things like that aren’t going to be salvageable. So, when I pulled it out it was just a breath of fresh air.”

The day was supposed to be a happy one for Taylor. She got engaged to her boyfriend one hour before the fire started at her childhood home. Her father, was working on a car in the garage and started to clean up to go to Taylor’s engagement party.

“It started in the back of the garage,” said David. “The fire spread just like that. It was real quick.”

The cause of the fire is still under investigation. The blaze burned through half of the house, eating everything in its path and leaving a thick layer of soot smoke on everything else. Their cat, also died in the fire. But, almost perfectly preserved, aside from a layer of black powder from the fire, was the picture of her late wife.

“She had a real good sense of humor. She was a lot of fun,” David said as her remembered Kathi.

The Kennedy’s have had their fair share of tragedies. Taylor called walking through the charred remains of the home she grew up in, hours after her engagement, a surreal moment.

“I’m trying to celebrate and grieve at the same time. It’s given me something to look forward to amongst all of this. You try not to think the worst, but when you go in, it is so much worse than you had anticipated it.”

As David looked at the soot covered photo of his late wife, he managed to imagine walking his daughter down the aisle.

“That’s the bright spot of life. That’s the best part of my life so far,” David said of Taylor’s engagement.

And as for his wife’s unsolved murder, his eyes watered for a moment and his voice broke as he said, “It doesn’t look like they’ll ever solve it. I guess we’ll find out when we leave this earth.”

The unburned photo might just show, Kathi will be there for her daughter's wedding. Just, not the way they might have pictured it.