The Depraved Crimes of Child Killer Earle Nelson: The Abduction and Murder of Desarae Klein

In the pantheon of Missouri's most sadistic and depraved criminals, the name Earle Nelson will forever be seared into the darkest chapters of infamy. A remorseless serial pedophile and murderer, Nelson spent decades tormenting the communities of the Midwest with his twisted urges towards raping and killing innocent children before finally being put to death in 2015.

His final known victim was 8-year-old Desarae Klein - a bright, energetic young girl whose life was horrifically stolen on a sunny October day in 1997. Desarae had been enjoying an afternoon of harmless fun at a campground near her Missouri hometown when the unthinkable occurred. In a parent's worst nightmare realized, she vanished without a trace from the public park, abducted by the calculating hands of Earle Nelson.

For nearly a month, a frantic search ensued amidst agonizing uncertainty for her desperate family. But their hopes of Desarae's safe return were brutally shattered on November 5th when her body was discovered in an abandoned trailer in neighboring Kansas. The sickening truth soon revealed itself - Desarae had been viciously sexually assaulted before being strangled to death by her depraved kidnapper.

"How could someone do something so evil to such a sweet, innocent little girl?" Desarae's grandmother Carolyn Greenwood tearfully asked at the time. "That monster doesn't deserve to keep breathing air."

But the unspeakable nightmare of Desarae Klein's final moments was just the latest in a long, disturbing pattern of depravity by Nelson targeting the most vulnerable of victims. The convicted murderer had been carrying a perverse, hardwired obsession with sexually assaulting children since a very young age himself.

As early as the 1960s, Nelson's name began accumulating a rap sheet that featured assaults, robberies, and most chillingly, sexual misconduct involving minors. He would cyclically be arrested, imprisoned briefly, only to inevitably re-offend in a more heinous fashion upon release, his demented urges never receiving the mental rehabilitation they required.

Indeed, Desarae's murder was not even Nelson's first such crime against a child. Just a year prior, in July 1997, he had snatched 10-year-old Pamela Butler off the street in her Kansas City neighborhood. Like Desarae, Pamela had been raped and strangled to death, her body callously discarded in a drainage ditch by her killer.

"This is the worst kind of criminal there is," remarked prosecutor Amy McGowan at Nelson's trial, where he was convicted of both murders in 2002. "He deliberately hunted innocent children to satisfy his warped sexual appetites through repeated acts of violence, rape and murder."

Throughout the proceedings, Nelson displayed a nauseating indifference to the families forced to relive their worst nightmares in agonizing detail. He outright confessed to the vicious crimes in graphic detail, never once expressing so much as an inkling of remorse for robbing two young lives of their promising futures.

Even the defense attorneys tasked with preserving his life acknowledged the evil they were dealing with. "He is the worst of the worst," said one public defender, "but we still have a duty to prevent a cruel execution under the law and Constitution."

Ultimately, Nelson was sentenced to death for the murders of Desarae Klein and Pamela Butler, sealing his fate as one of the most reviled human beings in Missouri history. After over a decade of unsuccessful appeals attempting to delay his punishment, he was finally executed by lethal injection on August 14, 2015 at the age of 68.

But the indelible trauma of Nelson's reign of terror still reverberates in the shattered lives of his victims' loved ones, forever denied the solace of seeing their young family members grow up to realize all the dreams he so mercilessly snuffed out.

"He took my baby before we could experience all the joys of parenthood - seeing her graduate, getting married, becoming a mother herself," said Desarae's mother Tammy Klein, her voice trembling with a lifetime of unspeakable grief. "Now all we have is this pit of emptiness inside us that can never be filled."

With society's most unrepentant child rapists and murderers like Earle Nelson finally put down like the depraved human vermin they were, the void of justice they leave behind is little solace. Only an enduring heartbreak remains, a somber reminder of the pure innocence that can be so cruelly eradicated by evil's most unforgivable ambassadors.